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Winkler relates Fritz Lang's mediaeval epic film "Die Nibelungen" to the three Western films he made in Hollywood. In particular, the last of these, "Rancho Notorious," reworks the theme of fate, murder and revenge, which is fundamental no only to "Die Nibelungen" but also to Lang's work as a whole.

Two quintessentially American film genres, the Western and film noir, have been more strongly influenced by European literary and cinematic traditions than all others. Westerns are thematically related to the heroic archetypes of classical and mediaeval mythology, while film noir is a direct offspring of German expressionist cinema. (On the former see Winkler, "Classical Mythology," and "Mythologische Motive"; on the latter, especially McArthur.) Among the directors who have contributed major works to both kinds of film is Fritz Lang, the most important of the expatriate German directors in Hollywood. From Fury, his first American film in 1936, to his last one twenty years later (Beyond a Reasonable Doubt), virtually all of Lang's American work is in the tradition of film noir, with whose origins he had been familiar since his days at the UFA studios in Berlin. A number of Lang's important German films had dealt with some of the chief themes of noir cinema, in particular big-city corruption: Dr. Mabuse der Spieler, Metropolis, M, and Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse. In Hollywood, Lang reworked his European themes not only in his noirs but also in his three Westerns: The Return of Frank James, Western Union, and Rancho Notorious. For his Westerns, Lang also took recourse to themes and archetypes he had developed most extensively in his two-part silent film Die Nibelungen, based on the mediaeval German epic.

As had been the case with much of ancient and mediaeval epic, literary genres that arose from an oral tradition centuries old, filmmaking is a collective process, especially under the studio system in which Lang worked all his life. For this reason, Lang did not always achieve what he wanted in every respect and had to put up with studio interference or censorship. A recurring theme in his 1965 conversations with Peter Bogdanovich is the phrase "no copyright for directors" ("Fritz Lang" 213).1 But the films make it immediately obvious that none other than Lang himself is their sole artistic creator. Rancho Notorious is a case in point. Its plot is credited to a screenwriter other than Lang, and the script in turn is based on yet someone else's story: "Gunsight Whitman" by Sylvia Richards ("Silvia" in the film's credits), turned into a screenplay by Daniel Taradash. But Lang said in his conversations with Bogdanovich that it had been his intent to "write a picture about an aging, but still very desirable, dance-hall girl and an old gun hand who is not so good on the draw anymore. So I constructed this story" ("Fritz Lang" 211; McGilligan 380-88 and 393 provides a detailed account of the film's plot and of its making; the idea and early drafts of the script were by Lang; cf. McGilligan 380). Lang's words are neither an idle claim nor an attempt to take credit where none is due. Despite the changes from his original intention that the finished film contains, Rancho Notorious deals with themes essential to Lang's whole body of work.

Man's struggle against fate, a theme as fundamental to classical literature since the Iliad and Greek and Roman tragedy as it is to mediaeval culture, is the main thread connecting Lang's films, not least where larger-than-life characters are their protagonists. As he himself put it, "[it's] the main characteristic, the main theme that runs through all my pictures-this fight against destiny, against fate" (Bogdanovich, "Fritz Lang" 191). As a young man growing up in Vienna, Lang had his first experiences with artistic representations of death and destiny on the stage (McGilligan 15). These were to become a formative influence on his own work as early as his 1921 film Der mude Tod (literally, "Weary Death"; English title: Destiny). In Lang's first Western, the heroic theme of revenge for the treacherous death of his brother, the outlaw Jesse James, draws a peaceable Frank James more and more into a quagmire of violence and killing. This leads to a moral quandary, which such figures invariably face: the contrary forces of irreconcilable responsibilities. Kriemhild's words to Rudiger in Part 2 of Die Nibelungen express the subject as succinctly as possible: "Blut schreit nach Blut" `blood screams for blood: In Frank's case, the heroic duty to avenge his brother's death is in opposition to his responsibility to save the life of an innocent man who is threatened by execution in Frank's stead; his conflicting responsibilities make Frank, in his own words, "sick inside." The spiral of violence begetting ever more violence, of revenge leading to further bloodshed-one of the main themes of Iliad and Nibelungenlied-is broken only when Frank, in his pursuit of the cowardly Ford brothers, who had shot Jesse James in the back, comes close to confronting them but is spared from killing them himself. (They fall to their deaths.) The film denies its hero the showdown that audiences expect from a Western and that is the traditional climactic moment of heroism for its protagonist. Only in this way can the hero both prove his superiority over his enemies-if he had faced them in a showdown, we know that Frank would have defeated and killed them-and remain morally unambiguous. As a result, he is able to give up his life as an outlaw. At film's end he returns to society and marries the pure young lady with whom he has fallen in love. Lang's first Western has dear overtones of the heroic theme outlined above; his other two will treat it even more explicitly and with increasingly greater depth.

The Return of Frank James was a studio assignment, as was Lang's next Western. But Western Union is closely tied to fundamental themes in Lang's work. Its plot involves the archetypal subject of two unequal brothers separated by contrasting alliances. They are on opposite sides in the Civil War. The protagonist, a reformed outlaw, finds himself confronted with the dilemma that most epic and tragic heroes face: justice and responsibility to society on the one hand and the blood ties linking him to his evil brother on the other. The film ends with the brothers' duel, in which the "bad guy" kills the "good guy" and is in turn killed shortly after by the hero's friend. The death of the Western hero runs counter to genre expectations and links the serious Western to the classical and mediaeval mythic and literary tradition. As Robert Warshow put it in his essay on the Western hero, "his story need not end with his death (and usually does not); but what we finally respond to is not his victory but his defeat" (143). In the last shot of Lang's film, we see the hero's grave and the Western Union telegraph line extending into the distance during a blood-red sunset-or is it a dawn?-and we understand that the hero's death was a necessary sacrifice for the establishment of civilization, here symbolized by the advance of modern technology. Lang's protagonist foreshadows the similar figure of Tom Doniphon in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance or the outlaw gang in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch. These are only two prominent examples.

Rancho Notorious, Lang's most profound Western, represents his closest reworking of the European literary tradition even on a formal level. The film is noteworthy for two stylistic features. It employs flashbacks to an extent unusual for Westerns, and it was the first Western to use a theme song as a continuous commentary on its plot. The film was originally to be named, after this song, The Ballad of Chuck-A-Luck. Although he is no more than an unidentified voice and not part of the action, Lang's balladeer functions like a mediaeval minstrel; we may compare him with Volker in the Nibelungenlied. Balladeers and singers in the folk tradition may remain unnamed or may carry generic names, such as those that point to their close ties to the people, their audiences. Thus Volker, whose name derives from the German word Volk, is "the people's man"; the etymology of his name is comparable to that of Demodocus, the poet-singer in the Odyssey, whose name means "pleasing the people." The archetypal function of such figures as expressed in their names is more significant than their individuality.

The plot of Rancho Notorious involves a young man's search for the man who has raped and killed his fiancee. On his search, Vern Haskell encounters the aging gunfighter Frenchy Fairmont, who leads him to the secret hideaway of an outlaw gang. Their lair, the film's eponymous ranch, is run by Frenchy's lover, a morally ambiguous woman with the weirdly appropriate name of Altar Keane, played by Marlene Dietrich. The German release title of the film, Engel der Gejagten (Angel of the Hunted), not only makes her the film's chief character-Marlene Dietrich was better known in Germany than were Arthur Kennedy or Mel Ferrer, her co-stars-but also emphasizes the quasi-religious, that is, highly moral, nature of the story.

The theme of murder, revenge, and sacrificial death as the price of redemption for earlier sins or crimes becomes most pronounced in the film's ballad, written by Ken Darby. Its four occurrences, at the beginning and the end and twice in the course of the narrative, structure the film's story and may be compared to the songs-Gesange or chansons-that appear in the titles of some mediaeval epics, most famously El Cantar de Mfo Cid and The Song of Roland. The term song is used to indicate the divisions of ancient and mediaeval epic; as Lang knew, modern German still calls the books of Greek and Roman epic Gesange, and the term recurs in his film version of Die Nibelungen in accordance with the mediaeval tradition. In Rancho Notorious, the ballad's refrain gives us the key words that point not only to this film's theme but also to that of all Lang's major works: "hate, murder, and revenge." Apropos of his 1938 film You and Me, Lang said about the function of song: "In a song with good lines and good music, you can teach something" (Bogdanovich, "Fritz Lang" 192). More than a dozen years after making Rancho Notorious, Lang still felt an affinity for the "Ballad of Chuck-A-Luck" and, by extension, for the film: "Personally, I love that song very much" (213). Lang himself quotes part of the ballad when he discusses his film The Big Heat, one of the darkest of all noir films (218; on the affinities of these two films, see Wood). Ever since his youth, Lang had loved folk music (McGilligan 16).

The first lines of the ballad in Rancho Notorious address the mythical nature of the story and set it in a time long past:

Oh, listen, listen well,

listen to the legend of Chuck-A-Luck,

Chuck-A-Luck;

listen to the song of the gambler's wheel,

a souvenir from a bygone year

spinning a tale of the old frontier.

The lines immediately following reinforce the story's legendary nature and present it as if it were an old oral folktale: "It began, they say" and "'Twas back in the early 'Seventies." The wheel of Chuck-A-Luck, a kind of "vertical roulette," as Lang called it (Bogdanovich, "Fritz Lang" 212), is a modern variant of the mediaeval wheel of fortune. Lang, who named the eponymous ranch Chuck-A-Luck, was prevented by studio owner Howard Hughes from entitling the film as he wanted. Since he thought European audiences would not know the meaning of "Chuck-A-Luck," Hughes changed the film's title (213). This provoked a sarcastic comment from Lang: "It is a good thing they know what `rancho notorious' means" (Ott 57; a slightly different comment of Lang's occurs in Bogdanovich, "Fritz Lang" 213). Patrick McGilligan, however, concludes that the title change was an act of revenge on Lang by the film's producer, Howard Welsch (388). While the wheel had frequently been a symbol of good luck in antiquity, the Middle Ages primarily employed it to point to the instability of human fate and to the fickleness of fortune. In the film, the wheel's name reveals its nature: the gambler risks to chuck away his good luck at each turn (cf. Wood 91). The wheel spinning its tale may even be considered a loose analogy to the thread of the Fates, which represents human life in classical myth. The wheel is a dear sign of the ancient and especially of the mediaeval overtones in Lang's work.

The song's first instalment ends ominously. It alerts viewers to the seriousness of the film's theme and reminds them of its archaic nature:

So listen to the legend of Chuck-A-Luck,

Chuck-A-Luck;

listen to the wheel of fate,

as round and round

with a whispering sound

it spins, it spins

the old, old story

of hate, murder, and revenge.

The repetitions are brief but noteworthy modern examples of the compositional style of early epic. Repetitions and their close relatives, formulae, are significant components in the oral tradition of epic poetry. Modern scholarship has shown that they appear with far greater sophistication, thematic significance, and intentionality than had generally been realized. (See, in particular, Foley, Immanent Art and Singer, with additional references. Cf. also Fenik on the parallels between Homeric epic and the Nibelungenlied.) The ballad's second appearance spells out the obsessive and relentless nature of Vern Haskell's search; the mediaeval context becomes explicit in the word "quest":

So on and on relentlessly

this man pursues his quest,

through autumn and winter,

searching the great Southwest.

This thing that drives him like a whip

will never let him rest

[...................]

and deep within him burn the fires

of hate, murder, and revenge.

The image accompanying the last line quoted is a close-up of Vern's brooding face, partly shadowed. Filling the screen and staring at the viewer, it is a visual reminder of the use of close-ups in silent cinema to convey emotional intensity. Today this looks quaint or excessive, but it is in keeping with the overly stylized nature of early film acting. Close-ups of Brunhild and Attila in Lang's Die Nibelungen carry a similar function.

The ballad's next appearance on the soundtrack identifies the fires burning in Vern as his "goal" of revenge. The song's final occurrence then summarizes the whole story: "and so ends the tale / of hate, murder, and revenge." The outlaws left dead at the final shootout now accompany the two survivors, Vern and Frenchy: they "rode beside them on the trail"-presumably as shadows or spirits-"for they died that day, / so the legends tell." This is an instance of the standard view of storytelling in Westerns: a story may be over, but the process of telling it will continue forever, and even stories of simple people will turn into legends or myths. Herein lies another analogy of the Western to ancient as well as mediaeval tales (cf. Winkler, "Classical Mythology" 527-32; "Mythologische Motive" 572-75; "Mythical and Cinematic Traditions" 105-07). Moreover, the reference to the invisible presence of the dead outlaws is analogous to the supernatural appearance of the spirits of slain warriors in epic. From this perspective, the film's German title provides a connection to the supernatural quality of Lang's story as well.

Lang reveals the mythical nature of his story and of its chief characters throughout the film not only verbally but also visually. In several scenes the rocks and mesas of the Southwest are painted backdrops, an aspect of the film immediately obvious, perhaps even irritating, to experienced cinema-goers. But contemptuous dismissal of this as a glaring fault misses the point. We may in fact think back to the artificial forest through which Siegfried rides in Part 1 of Die Nibelungen before he stays the dragon. In both cases the evident artifice heightens the legendary nature of the story and elevates it beyond the level of realism. Lang himself pointed to this when he said, "I remember how Thea von Harbou [his scriptwriter and, at the time, his wife] and myself tried [... ] to find a forest that seemed to fit the intended stylisation of the Nibelungen. We could not find a 'heroic' forest [... ] and after discussions with my working crew [... I we decided to build the forest" (Eisner 378; on the stylistic function of the artificial forest in Die Nibelungen, see Kreimeier 105, with a quotation from one of Lang's set designers). Lang would have used the American Redwood forests for Die Nibelungen if he had known of them at that time (Eisner 378)-a telling instance of the affinity of the American West to mediaeval European myth. According to Lang, the only natural location in Die Nibelungen are the sand dunes down which the Huns gallop to announce to King Etzel Kriemhild's arrival in Part 2 (Eisner 378). This scene looks strongly like a Western. In Rancho Notorious, Lang turned the restrictions that the studio was imposing on him into a virtue: "We had a very limited budget and decided to make everything in the studio" (Bogdanovich, "Fritz Lang" 211). A few location shots do, however, occur. The artifice is especially obvious when we see, from Vern's point of view, Altar Keane's ranch for the first time: an abrupt change of scenery from the natural outdoors to studio rocks and a painted backdrop of the ranch in the far distance, with small red clouds in the sky. All of the ranch's exteriors are a set, as even the echo of voices and sounds reveals: "The courtyard of the ranch house [ ...] was built in the studio" (212, emph. in original). It should come as no surprise to viewers who are alert to the legendary aspects of the story to hear Frenchy say to Vern, the newcomer: "Don't be surprised at anything around here."

By this point in the narrative, Altar Keane has become a legendary character in the viewer's mind. Not by accident did Lang give only Siegfried and Altar white horses to ride in their respective films. Until now the film has revealed Altar, her story, and her character in a series of flashbacks, through which we gradually learn more and more about her but which have also made her an almost mythical figure. Vern says to her when he is being introduced: "I've heard so many different stories about you, I wasn't certain there was an Altar Keane." He later asks her about her previous life and wants to find out"what stories about [her] are true, and what aren't." When Veto first lays eyes on Altar, Lang again gives him a noir-like stare, which indicates a new twist in the plot, an additional emotional entanglement. Vern will become strongly attracted to her, and, although he will not forget his revenge or the memory of his fiance, his eventual love for Altar will make it possible for him to overcome the destructive obsession of his quest.

The theme of fate in connection to time is particularly prominent in one of the love scenes between Altar and Vern. Significantly, it is set among blatantly fake rocks on a sound stage. As the ballad has told us at the beginning, the whole story is "a souvenir of a bygone year," and these words point not only to the distant (i.e., legendary) nature of the tale but also reveal that the characters are inextricably entangled in their destiny as it plays itself out in the course of their lives. Before this scene, Frenchy had told Altar, "Time holds us together, and time's stronger than a rope." Now Altar, half in love with the considerably younger Vern, says to him, "I wish you'd go away and come back ten years ago," an impossible wish to turn back the wheel of fate and time. Although she feels strongly attracted to Vern, Altar also wants to stay faithful to Frenchy. She cannot betray his trust; indeed, her whole existence depends on trust since, as we have learned earlier in the film, this is the very principle on which Altar runs her ranch, the only way in which she can keep her position of authority over a gang of unruly cutthroats and gunslingers. We remember that faith and trust are fundamental qualities in the Nibelungen saga as well, praised at the very beginning of Lang's version of it. The term Nibelungentreue, implying unwavering faith even unto death, has become a proverbial expression in German. Appropriately, a German actress embodies this virtue in Rancho Notorious.

Altar eventually comes close to succumbing to her passion for Vern, but her hope to retrieve her lost youth and to live her life over again cannot, of course, become reality. Instead, it proves fatal to her. Vern himself endangers Altar's life by using her to bring about a confrontation with Frenchy, whom he has come to suspect of being his fiancee's killer. Altar prepares to leave Chuck-A-Luck after her highly dramatic last scene with Vern, described above, in order to start anew, but it is too late. Vern has by now discovered the true identity of his fiancee's rapist and murderer. Although he had become more and more obsessed by his quest for revenge, Vern is able to conquer his base instincts and has the killer handed over to the law. But in the ensuing shootout Altar catches a bullet meant for Frenchy. Shortly before, she had remained undaunted by Frenchy's threat to kill her if she left him; now she voluntarily pays with her life to atone for her previous existence. She saves Frenchy's life at the cost of her own and proves him right about the strength of their attachment. But her sacrifice also prevents a showdown between Frenchy and Vern, in which Vern would have had no chance to outdraw the far more experienced Frenchy. Altar thus also saves Vern's life. Frenchy realizes this and tells him so: "She stepped in front of that bullet to save you" (wrongly on this, Wood 93). In this way, Vern escapes the spiral of violence that had threatened to undermine his morality; in this outcome of his quest he is comparable to Lang's Frank James.

Lang makes the redemptive value of Altar's death for the future lives of Vern and Frenchy overwhelmingly clear in the film's final image. Over the last installment of the ballad, we see a long shot of Chuck-A-Luck, a painted backdrop as in its first appearance, and then Vern and Frenchy are riding off into the distance-in a magnificent extreme long shot of real rocks and desert. This is an effective ending to Lang's story, appropriate for a Western. But it is more than just this. It also indicates that Vern and Frenchy are now leaving behind the land of heroism and the elevated and partly unreal level of their mythical story: they are returning to reality (differently, but unconvincingly, Wood 91). Riding off into the distance, they relinquish their larger-than-life stature. McGilligan reports that producer Welsch forced this ending on Lang against the latter's judgement (387). If this is true, either Lang managed to integrate the ending into the archetypal nature of his film, or a hostile producer's decision for once helped a film.

The traditional storyline of hate, murder, and revenge, which has routinely provided convenient and simple plotlines to countless stories, novels, and films, is much more complex in Lang's work. Here it is one of time and fate, of murder and revenge, and of sacrifice and redemption. But this list could equally well describe the largescale and complicated plot of Lang's Die Nibelungen, with the obvious exception of its last item. Given the deaths of almost all the protagonists, there is hardly any redemption to be seen in that film. Rancho Notorious, however, goes beyond the bleak world view of Lang's mediaeval film. There Etzel could say to Kriemhild: "Warst du such nie in Liebe eins mit mir, so warden wir doch endlich eins im Hass." [Although you were never one with me in love, we finally became one in hate.] The latter film begins as Vern's story of hate and revenge but subtly turns into the story of Altar Keane, that is to say, into a story of love and redemption, if at the price of her life. From this perspective, it makes good sense that Marlene Dietrich's name was the first to appear in the credits, a reason more important than the mere fact that she was the film's chief box-office draw.

To bring into focus the mythic-heroic and ultimately tragic nature of the film's narrative, we need only follow Peter Bogdanovich's lead and change one letter in the ballad's refrain, to make it say not "hate" but "fate. Bogdanovich's essay introducing his conversations with Lang is appropriately entitled "Fate, Murder and Revenge" ("Fritz Lang" 170-75). In doing so, we can also see, again with Bogdanovich, the close links of Rancho Notorious to Lang's whole body of work and, in particular, to his retelling of the Nibelungen saga, one of the most powerful versions of the same theme in mediaeval literature. All these works deal with fate, murder, and revenge and with the fundamentally tragic rule of fortune over man. As an expression of Lang's view of the fall of the Nibelungen, Bogdanovich quotes the following lines from the "Ballad of Chuck-A-Luck," although they were not used in the film:

Revenge is a bitter and evil fruit

And Death hangs beside it on the bough.

These men who lived by the code of hate

Have nothing to live for now [...] ("Fritz Lane 172)

The phrase "Death [ ...] on the bough" will remind viewers of Lang's films of the flowering bush whose white blossoms assume the shape of a skull in Part 1 of Die Nibelungen as an omen of Siegfried's death. In a number of Lang's films, including Die Nibelungen and Rancho Notorious, the protagonists "believe, as Lang did about himself, that they have been martyred by fate" (McGilligan 382; cf., however, McGilligan 467, quoting Lang's change of opinion about the theme of "man trapped by fate" as discussed in Eisner 147, with quotations from Lang and reference to a 1947 article by him on this change; cf. also Eisner 337, 380, and 398). In his case, the creator or teller of heroic stories is inseparable from their heroes. Both Old-World and New-World figures fuse into a highly personal re-imagining of archetypal models.

As Lang once put it, "don't forget the Western is not only the history of this country-it is what the saga of the Nibelungen is for the European" (Bogdanovich, "Fritz Lang" 193; cf. Eisner 197 on The Return of Frank James). Lang was understandably amused when he received an accolade from old-time Westerners about the accuracy of his depiction of the West in Western Union: "I don't think this picture really depicted the West as it was; maybe it lived up to certain dreams, illusions-what the Old Timers wanted to remember of the Old West" (Bogdanovich, "Fritz Lang" 194, emph. in original; on Lang's research for this film and on his familiarity with Indian cultures, see 195; Ott 41, 192). What we most want to remember about the past, be it the European Middle Ages or the American West or, for that matter, classical antiquity, is not its history but its legend, its myth. In 1941, Lang told an interviewer, "All my life I've loved the American West" (qtd. in Ott 191). While filming his first Western, he is reported to have exclaimed, "I thought the James boys were the greatest heroes since Robin Hood-I used to cry over Jesse's death As a young man, Lang had read numerous Western stories and had been fascinated by the myth of the American frontier. In 1905, he even saw Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, an experience he incorporated as late as 1951 into the screenplay of an unproduced film (McGilligan 17-18). In America, Lang had a large collection of Western novels in his library (383). So it is no surprise for him to have stated: "I love Westerns. They are based on a very simple and essential ethical code" (qtd. in Eisner 197). Lang is obviously correct about the fundamental importance of this code, but he is wrong, or too modest, about its simplicity. His own work reveals that it is anything but simple. Fate, murder, and revenge, the key themes in the Nibelungen saga and in Lang's version of it, are carried over not only into his films set in contemporary America but also, and most evidently, into his Westerns.

[Author Affiliation]

MARTIN M. WINKLER is a professor of classics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. His most recent books are the anthology Juvenal in English (Penguin, 2001) and the edited collection of essays entitled Classical Myth and Culture in the Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2001). He has published on Roman literature, on the classical tradition, and on classical and mediaeval culture and mythology in film.