Copyright Telos Press, Ltd. Jul 31, 2003All cultures are located in place and time. Exile culture is located at the intersection and in the interstices of other cultures.
-- Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands
The Foreigner's Gaze
A barbershop in a small Midwestern town. A patron, waiting to be shaved, holds forth about the need for a law that would ban radical ideas in schools. Another customer, the local teacher, reminds him: "It's not possible to get a law that denies the right to say what one believes. In peace-time, anyway." The patron looks stunned and asks: "Who says so?" The teacher replies: "The Constitution of the United States." "You should read it sometime," interrupts the elderly barber in heavily accented English. "You would be surprised. I had to read it to become an American. You never had to because you were born here."
This telling exchange occurs in Fury, Fritz Lang's first American film, which opened on June 5, 1936 at The Capitol, one of New York's largest movie palaces. The scene suggests that foreigners know the basics of the U.S. Constitution, while natives do not. Holding a straight razor, the immigrant barber hovers over the local customer who sits immobilized in the chair, foam across his face. The setting underscores the immigrant's superior position with subtle comedy. Coming from outside the country but now living within it, immigrants and exiles have the privilege of being both insider and outsider -- a position that allows them to examine their new surroundings with a critical eye. 2 Fury's barbershop scene epitomizes (in less than a minute of screen time) what many exile films have in common: a double-edged critique from a vantage point that compares and judges the new against the old, the unknown against the known, the present against the past, the indigenous against the foreign.
2. "... maybe one has to come from the outside to see with such accuracy," comment Erika and Klaus Mann on Fritz Lang's achievements in Fury. Claiming that Hollywood had been good for Lang's artistic development because it forced him to leave the large-scale "gimmicky" films like Metropolis and Woman in the Moon behind and focus on the "inner life" of the characters instead, they emphasize that Lang as a "stranger" captured the small town with "dreamlike precision." See Erika and Klaus Mann, Escape to Life: Deutsche Kultur im Exil (Munich: edition spangenberg, 1991) 294f.
Sensitized from his own encounter with National Socialism, Lang felt empowered to point out what he considered fascist thinking in his newly adopted homeland. He also implies that banning free speech, as proposed in the barbershop scene, is part of a mentality that leads to mob violence and murder. Lang, whose last German film, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, was banned by the Nazis in 1933, must have been suspicious of the internal censorship introduced by Will Hays in 1930, only a few years prior to his arrival in America. 3 Lang's plea for freedom of expression resonates more deeply when viewed in terms of his own experience in Nazi Germany; but the film's response is equally critical of American citizens who do not live up to, and are even ignorant of, their own constitutional rights. The camera emphasizes the polarity of opinions by cutting back and forth between the barber and his customer, instead of depicting both in one frame. Like the immigrant barber, immigrant filmmakers acted as "strangers in the house" -- they often found fault with their adopted country, directing a stranger's gaze at what is familiar and unquestioned. Seen through immigrants' eyes, fascist practices -- bigotry, violence, and scape-goating -- seemed to rear their ugly head in the new homeland as well. It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis's ironically titled novel, published in 1935, while Lang was working on Fury, displays a high degree of self-awareness of America's totalitarian potential. Fascism is not supposed to happen in the United States, but, as Lewis argues, it could. Having experienced the beginnings of National Socialism, German refugee filmmakers came to lend authority to those American augurs who warned of the dangers of fascism in the United States.
3. The Motion Picture Production Code, the so-called Hays Code, named after Will Hays, prescribed in detail what filmmakers were not supposed to show to prevent open censorship by state and federal governments. The Hays Code was only strictly enforced after July 1, 1934; it remained unchanged until 1966.
In the mid-1930s, numerous events led observers to believe that fascism could indeed happen here. Newspapers reported almost daily on lynchings of blacks by white racists and, on the radio, Father Charles E. Coughlin, leader of the right-wing "National Union," propagated racist demagoguery against Jews and Communists. The Scottsboro Boys, nine African American youths falsely accused of rape, were illegally detained although the Supreme Court had overturned their convictions. Huey Long, the demagogic senator from Louisiana, was assassinated by an opponent in September 1935. All of these occurrences confirmed the fear of incipient fascism in America; they were symptoms of a country divided against itself along racial, political, social and ethnic lines. Although the American government recognized fascism's inexorable spread across Europe, it announced strict neutrality in what it preferred to understand as a civil war among European nations. 4 America had its own problems, such as economic distress in the aftermath of the Depression and rising political unrest. In 1935, America, not just Germany, had become a perilous place where freedom was endangered. "Must America Go Fascist?" asked the title of the lead article in Harper's Magazine in June 1934, the very month Lang arrived in America. 5
4. See Arnold A. Offner, American Appeasement: United States Foreign Policy and Germany, 1933-1938 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1969).
5. J.B. Matthews and R.E. Shallcross, "Must America Go Fascist?" Harper's Magazine 69 (June 1934): 1-15. They write: "A short while ago it would have been considered an impertinence to ask if the United States was moving toward fascism. Today such an inquiry concerning the political prospects of this country is both appropriate and inescapable..." (2). The article summarizes its findings as follows: "Our conclusion from the available data on basic social trends in the United States is to the effect that the discernible drift is at present in the direction of fascism, although it has not yet accelerated to a speed that suggests inevitability. There exists no adequate organization of anti-fascist forces which would seem to be strong enough to check this drift. The uniqueness of American institutions will not alone prevent a coalescence of forces that may ultimately welcome a fascist attempt to solve the problem of the continuing social crisis; only organization of opposing forces can prevent it. Those who believe that present tendencies will bear watching should not be regarded as conjuring up in imagination a non-existent peril" (15).
Hollywood weighed in with films about agitators, vigilante mobs, and violent actions associated with European fascism: Gregory la Cava's Gabriel over the White House (1933) is a politically ambivalent fairytale that directly responded to Hitler's takeover of Germany. The film toys with the idea of an anti-democratic but effective president who brings about change as a tyrant. The story is contrived: A bragging president who closes his eyes to social problems (a million unemployed marching on Washington) becomes, after a serious car accident, miraculously transformed into an activist leader who creates jobs, fights organized crime, and forces other nations to disarm. The transformation comes about by divine intervention (alluded to by a breeze in the curtains); the president's assistants give credit to the archangel Gabriel. The president is shown to accomplish these good deeds by manipulation and even dismissal of Congress, by violence and threats. Although one of the congressmen condemns the actions as "dictatorship," the film focuses on the president's resoundingly successful reforms. As the president signs the law assuring future peace among nations, he dies and the film ends. This fantasy production, financed by the conservative newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst among others, addresses the temptation of a benevolent fascism that would use force to solve social problems such as unemployment, poverty, and the breakdown of law and order, which plagued both America and Germany in the early 1930s. 6 While Roosevelt forced through the New Deal against the opposition of the ruling industrial elite, Hitler's similar work programs were part of a radical nationalist revolution with a different political trajectory. 7
6. See Richard Sheridan Ames, "The Screen Enters Politics," Harper's Magazine (Mar. 1935): 473-82, who reports that parts of Gabriel over the White House were so topical that they had to be "remade to parallel current history following Roosevelt's inauguration" (477).
7. See Dan P. Silverman, Hitler's Economy: Nazi Work Creation Programs, 1933-1936 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998).
Gabriel over the White House, produced by MGM, was playing in theaters as Lang prepared Fury, his own socially engaged film, for the same production company. However, Lang was less sanguine about the potential of fascism in America. Fury shares with Gabriel over the White House an excess of didactic speeches about American democracy, but Lang's film is ultimately less interested in politics than in social and psychological questions, such as the mob's inherent disposition toward violence or the power of the individual. Exiles and immigrants who had fled Fascist Europe for an idealized America felt an innate urgency to warn against mob mentality or the breakdown of law and order. They had seen the fanatical mindlessness of the masses with their own eyes. Fury is a film about fascist mobs familiar to Lang from Germany, but repositioned in the historical moment of 1935 America.
Dangers of Displacement
The story's trajectory follows Joe Wilson, the all-American Everyman, played by Spencer Tracy, on a journey that transforms him from a naive "child," as his fiancee calls him in the beginning, to a vindictive avenger. 8 Once he leaves home, his life is turned upside down; he finds himself a defenseless outcast and soon a victim of a vigilante mob. Thrust into unfamiliar territory, dislocated, and forlorn, he resembles a refugee stunned by the foreignness and hostility of the new country. The story proleptically records the experience of thousands of German exiles trying to cope with displacement and disorientation.
8. Fury was the first star vehicle for Spencer Tracy at MGM. He was known as an experienced character actor who, by the time of Fury, had played in 30 films in just five years.
Fury begins with an ironic image of the American Dream -- a window display for a bridal gown with lace, veils, and flowers in an exquisitely decorated bedroom -- all alluring but unaffordable in the midst of the Depression. By conflating capitalism and matrimony, Lang highlights traditional American values and institutions, thus making his ultimate deconstruction of those values and institutions all the more poignant. The camera tracks sideways to bring into view a mature-looking couple staring at the display. Joe, a gas station attendant and Catherine, a schoolteacher, dream about a wedding but lack of money forces Catherine to take a job far away in another town. We meet them on their last evening together before they separate. Unlike his brothers who turned to small crime to survive, Joe is honest and hard-working. His brothers ridicule him for his belief and trust in the American way -- that is, until the system fails him and he, too, learns his lesson. Joe's all-American ideals are put to the test when he leaves town and travels to see Catherine. Separation and displacement spell his doom.
When Fury opened in 1936, much was made of the director's identity as a foreigner. The New York Times spoke of the filmmaker as "the Viennese Fritz Lang of Metropolis and M fame." 9 A follow-up article a week later introduces Fritz Lang to the American public as the European artist who successfully fought mammon-obsessed Hollywood.
9. Frank S. Nugents, "Mob Rule under the Camera's Eye: A Grim Report on Lynch Law, Fritz Lang's 'Fury' Deserves Ranking among the Finest Dramas of the Year," New York Times 7 June 1936.
... Lang is seeking adjustment to Hollywood without, in any vital point, compromising. Metro, Lang understands, makes 8,000,000 a year. They do it largely with Cinderella stuff. He has no quarrel with that. But he believes that the screen has a responsibility, if not to the public, at least to itself.... When Lang arrived in Hollywood two years ago this month, he was viewed with unconcealed suspicion. In the first place he was a 'foreigner' and those fellows are notorious for being 'arty.' 10
10. D.W.C., "Fritz Lang Bows to Mammon," New York Times 14 June 1936.
Lang is stylized as the "Stranger in the House" who is also welcomed -- despite his mysterious monocle, his "German" work ethic (which made him extremely unpopular with actors and crew), and any suspected anti-Americanism: "He loves America and is avidly interested in it -- he has his first papers and is impatient to get his finals. All of his leisure time during the two years has been spent touring, living in small towns, talking to people." 11
11. D.W.C., "Fritz Lang Bows to Mammon." Lang's notorious problems with union-controlled technicians while shooting his first American film are narrated in Patrick McGilligan, Fritz Lang (New York: St. Martin's, 1997) 231. In general, Fury's production difficulties, as detailed in McGilligan's exhaustive account (209-35), confirm the suspicion that Lang was persistently humiliated and made to feel an outsider and "stranger" to the system.
Several reviewers made a special point about Lang's "foreign" vantage point. Variety, for instance, remarked: "It seems curious that an Austrian director should so faithfully capture the nuances that are so inherently American and attuned to the native mentality." 12 Throughout his American period, Lang led a double life. Born in Austria in 1890 and living in Germany from 1918-1933, where he directed no fewer than twenty films, he was in his mid-forties when he went into exile. Although he tried hard to advance his career in Hollywood by assimilating to its practices and customs, attitudes and mentality, he also was part of the sophisticated, multinational community of filmmakers, hundreds of whom were fellow refugees from Central and Eastern Europe. Filmmakers had it both easier and harder than poets, novelists, and playwrights. In contrast to many writers who depended on their native language for their craft, Lang worked in film -- a language which, at least at first glance, is international. Unlike Doblin and Brecht, who worked as screenwriters for a movie industry they despised, Lang accommodated himself to the studio system. He also fought it fiercely, which may explain why Lang changed production companies with almost every film he made.
12. Variety 10 June 1936.
Although Lang could have stayed in Hitler's Germany, he chose to leave for exile in Paris in 1933, where he directed Liliom, a comedy with numerous playful references to the bureaucracy of exile (passports, stamping of identity papers) and to questions of law and authority, thus prefiguring some of the narrative tropes in Fury. In Paris, he considered various offers from Hollywood and finally signed a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the most commercially successful studio at the time. David O. Selznick, in search "for European talent," had recruited Lang in early 1934, as the New York Times proudly reported: "Selznick found Fritz Lang, the brilliant German director, in Paris, and persuaded him, without much difficulty, to make his first trip to Hollywood. 'Germany's loss,' he observed enigmatically in referring to his two acquisitions, 'is America's gain.'" 13 It was not Lang's first trip to Hollywood; he had visited the United States a decade earlier, promoting his two-part Nibelungen film in New York. He had also been to Hollywood which left a deep impression on him: "Germany has never had," he wrote in 1926, "and never will have, the gigantic human and financial reserves of the American film industry at its disposal." He also praised American cinematography as the "best photography in the world." 14
13. See "Mr. Selznick's Fruitful Trip," New York Times 17 June 1934. The other "acquisition" was Leontine Sagan, the director of Madchen in Uniform.
14. See Fritz Lang, "The Future of the Feature Film in Germany," in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, eds. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: U of California P, 1994) 622f. Lang also argues that the technical superiority of the Americans surely pales against the German focus on soul, on the human character, and on lighting that creates a mood and carries a spiritual idea instead of a "mere plot."
It is not surprising that Lang gladly accepted the invitation. He also had supporters at MGM, which at the time was known for its glitzy musicals, glamour, and high production values. Irving Thalberg, influential head of production, considered Lang's M a model of artistic filmmaking, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who had spent time in Berlin and was now a producer at MGM, idolized Lang. Accompanied by Selznick, Lang arrived in New York on June 12, 1934; they continued by train and a week later reached Hollywood, welcomed by old colleagues from Weimar's film community, including Ernst Lubitsch, Erich Pommer, and Joe May. The initial euphoria soon gave way to a sense of loss and failure. Gottfried Reinhardt, the famous theater director's young son who helped Lang find a house, remembered how terribly displaced, lonely and disoriented the new immigrant felt at first. At 44, he had to learn a new language and a new regime of filmmaking.
About one thousand men and women working in the German film industry shared Lang's fate. More than half of them took up residency in Hollywood. 15 Most found employment, as even a cursory look at the credits of US film productions in the 1940s reveals. Because the film industry also employed writers, the boundaries between literature, theater and cinema were more porous than they were in Germany. Thomas Mann invited Chaplin to his parties, while Bertolt Brecht befriended film actor Charles Laughton who then went on to play the lead in his play Galileo in Los Angeles. Max Reinhardt filmed his own stage production of Midsummer Night's Dream, while others, who had started as writers, for instance Billy Wilder and Robert Siodmak, became commercially successful film directors. Hollywood attracted so many German refugees, exiles and immigrants that the Los Angeles area was often referred to as "Weimar on the Pacific." 16
15. See Jan-Christopher Horak, "Exilfilm, 1933-1945. In der Fremde," in Geschichte des deutschen Films, ed. Wolfgang Jacobsen, Anton Kaes, Hans Helmut Prinzler (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993) 101-18.
16. See anecdotal-biographical studies on German Exiles in Hollywood: Anthony Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present, repr. (Berkeley: U of California P, 1997); John Russell Taylor, Strangers in Paradise: The Hollywood Emigres, 1933-1950 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983); Rudolf Ulrich, Osterreicher in Hollywood: Ein Beitrag zur Entwicklung des amerikanischen Films (Vienna: Verlag der osterreichischen Staatsdruckerei, 1993); Helmut G. Asper, "Hollywood -- Holle oder Paradies? Legende und Realitat der Lebens- und Arbeitsbedingungen der Exilanten in der amerikanischen Filmindustrie," Jahrbuch fur Exilforschung 10 (1992): 187-200; Helmut G. Asper, "Etwas Besseres als den Tod...." Filmexil in Hollywood: Portrats, Filme, Dokumente (Marburg: Schuren, 2002).
In the 1930s, Hollywood's power rested fully with studio moguls and producers, not with directors. Accustomed to having total control over his pictures, Lang never quite adjusted to the studio system and its bureaucratic, industrialized division of labor. Producers, who mediated between studio heads and directors, played a larger role in American film production than in Germany, as Lang would soon find out. Several of his stories and treatments with such titles as "Tomorrow," "The Man behind You," "Hell Afloat," and "Passport to Hell" were turned down before the script for Fury was finally "greenlighted" as a B-movie, mainly to keep writers and technicians occupied. Norman Krasna, a playwright for stage and screen, was the author of the screenplay, while Bartlett Cormack wrote most of the dialogue. MGM appointed the 25-year old Joseph L. Mankiewicz to oversee script development and production.
As with M, which was based on a serial murder case in 1929, Fury was inspired by newspaper reports in 1933 about the lynching of a man in prison. Krasna's screenplay 17 underwent many changes -- Joe was supposed to have been a lawyer instead of the common man that he is in the film -- and still further changes were made during shooting. The differences between script and film are telling, as the film consistently highlights the experience of dislocation. While the story had Joe and Mary (Catherine in the film) travel together, in Lang's Fury it is Joe who drives by himself to visit his fiancee. His solitariness more effectively suggests the dangers of his displacement. While the script motivates Joe's arrest because of an altercation with a policeman, the film emphasizes the lack of any substantial reason for his fate -- it is mere suspicion and mistaken circumstantial evidence that lead to his arrest. While the script includes a love relationship between Mary and the district attorney, Fury does away with this sentimental diversion -- the shocked victim is at the center. While the script ends melodramatically with Joe unable to stop the district attorney and Mary from telling the court that he is alive (and thus setting his attackers free), in the film he appears before the court himself, defiantly delivering a rousing speech about his disillusionment with American ideals. In all cases, the film sharpens the script to dramatize Joe's experience as a stranger and outcast in his own land.
17. The original story, entitled "Mob Rule" by Norman Krasna was nominated for Best Story in the 1936 Oscars. The manuscript, dated August 21, 1935, can be examined at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, California.
America on Trial
On his way to see Catherine, Joe drives through a rural area that could be anywhere in the American provinces. He is suddenly stopped by an armed police deputy outside a small town called Strand 18 where a child had been kidnapped and killed. Joe suddenly finds himself arrested without having done anything -- an egregious violation of his rights made even more outrageous for an audience that has seen him act like a model citizen, hard-working and honest, albeit a bit meek and naive. Joe cannot prove his innocence. On the contrary, an accidentally matching banknote and his habit of eating peanuts tie him to the kidnap murderer -- a motive that resonated in 1936 with the sensational kidnap murder charge against Bruno Hauptmann, an illegal immigrant from Germany, who was accused of abducting and murdering Charles Lindbergh's infant son in 1932. In one of the largest trials of the century, Hauptmann was convicted on circumstantial evidence (ransom money was found in his house) in February 1935 and executed on April 3, 1936. Fury opened only two months later, on June 5, 1936.
18. In his close reading of the film, Tom Gunning (The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity [London: bfi, 2000] 226) speculates that Strand might allude to the "Strand," the famous first movie palace in New York, thus adding another, self-reflexive level on which the film can be read.
Elated that the perpetrator is supposed to have been captured, rumor among the local townspeople spreads fast. The film shows women pass on the news from mouth to mouth, each time embellishing or adding to the story until it is completely distorted -- a process upon which Lang's camera sarcastically comments, first with close-ups of their mouths and ears (a stylistic remnant from his silent film days) and then with an old-fashioned metaphorical cut-away to geese clucking. The editing implies that gossiping women are geese -- a heavy-handed attempt, echoing a similar scene in Murnau's The Last Laugh, at comic relief. Unemployed men in the bar become agitated as the police deputy tells them the latest about the murder suspect. The crowd gets angrier; protestations by the deputy that nothing incriminating had been found in Joe's car are being brushed aside; the mood is set. The camera mingles among the radicals and is jostled about in the frame crowded with people ready to explode. Close-ups of excited faces and staccato editing produce a sense of pent-up chaotic energy that needs release.
A shady agitator from out of town taunts the locals to be less cowardly and to take justice into their own hands. The men protest and shuffle each other, voices rise, and a surge of energy runs through the closely packed space. Suddenly a young man jumps on the table and shouts: "Let's have some fun!" They burst through the door and march in ever-increasing numbers to the jail to demand that the prisoner be released to them for lynching. Lang stages the mob as a rowdy affair reminiscent of a carnival parade. The camera tracks along with overhead shots that register the growing number of men, women and children joining the pageant. The camera literally marches with them and comes to a sudden stop when the protesters confront the sheriff in front of the jail. The point of view shot positions the viewer as part of the crowd. Crosscuts between the Sheriff and the angry crowd heighten the tension. Soon objects are hurled at the police and the mob surges forward, storming the building and vandalizing it. We see a woman throwing a torch into the building to set it on fire. Joe peers through the bars of his small cell window, his face distorted with desperation. The camera adds unease by canting the shot in an unusual angle. It cuts between close-ups of Joe's frightened face and shots from above of raging masses, depicted not unlike the masses in Metropolis or M. More torches are thrown into the jail. Suddenly an explosion is heard off-screen.
Catherine, waiting in a nearby coffeehouse where she was supposed to meet up with Joe, hears about the impending lynching on the radio and rushes to the scene. Seconds after she arrives, we see her face in a close-up of shocked disbelief, and she faints. She has become witness to the murder of her fiancee by a mob -- or so she thinks. In truth, the explosion had blasted the walls of Joe's cell, allowing him to escape. The audience is not shown this but (like Catherine) is led to believe that he was killed when the jail burned down. Then one day, at his brothers' place, Joe suddenly stands in the doorway, reappearing unannounced as if risen from the dead, ready to avenge himself. The extreme back-lighting which keeps his face in full shadow suggests threat and danger. He hides during the court trial in which 22 of the instigators are accused of killing him; he is eager to have his attackers hanged for his murder that was intended but did not happen. Only after Catherine finds out and accuses him of having become as hardened as his would-be murderers, is he willing to come forward and thus prevent their conviction. But his last sarcastic words reveal the full extent of his trauma:
The law doesn't know that a lot of things that were very important to me, silly things maybe, like a belief in justice, and an idea that men were civilized, and a feeling of pride that this country of mine was different from all others ... the law doesn't know that those things were burned to death with everything that night.
The accusatory tone of Joe's speech is emphasized by his steady gaze. The camera keeps Joe framed in the center without cutting back to the judge's reaction. Instead it appears as if Joe were directly addressing the camera and thus the viewer (echoing the last scene in M, when Lorre turns to the audience for mercy). The camera cuts to Catherine only twice, registering her reactions to Joe's devastating condemnation of American justice. Is it the immigrant speaking, warning his adopted homeland against violating laws that guarantee personal freedom and safety? Joe's declaration that "this country of mine" is no different from any other is a withering critique of the exile's American dream. Not unlike Chaplin's rousing monologue at the end of The Great Dictator of 1940, Joe's speech rises above the narrative and appeals directly to the audience in the theater.
This harsh indictment of American justice is undercut by a trite ending that seems tacked on: a happy-end kiss between the reunited couple. Like the abrupt and unexpectedly conciliatory ending in Metropolis ten years earlier, Fury's barely motivated kissing scene comes suddenly. Looking back, Lang dismissed the happy end of Metropolis as fairytale and called the ending of Fury "coy." 19 Fury really has two endings. The first is of the couple which, separated in the beginning, reunites at the end -- a kiss seals this story. Although the private story ends well, the film is implicated in a larger story of public fears, paranoia, and violence. Political discourse is able to rupture private narratives with disastrous consequences -- a not-too-subtle reference to the rapid deterioration of Germany's political climate since 1933. Even the most innocent and private citizen -- and the film never tires of showing the "average Joe" in his unrelentingly honest and modest life -- is not protected against the irrational force of the mob. If seen in the context of fascism gathering strength globally, this is a conditional happy ending, as the perfunctory kiss seems to signify on the formal level.
19. Interview with Fritz Lang in Peter Bogdanovich, Who the Devil Made It. Conversations with Legendary Film Directors (New York: Ballantine, 1998) 187: "I hated the kiss, because I think it wasn't necessary. A man gives a speech that ... is very well written and extremely well delivered, and then suddenly, for no reason whatsoever ... -- they turn around and kiss each other. For me, a perfect ending was when he said, 'Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. God help me." You could have shown a close-up of Sylvia Sidney -- she is very happy -- he would look at her: period. It's such a coy ending now."
The 22 defendants are not the only ones on trial. What is really at stake is American democracy in 1936, and the film blatantly articulates this. The prosecutor says in his opening statement: "The whole nation hangs on the outcome of this trial. American democracy is on trial -- to its end. You must not be guided by your common sense, but your patriotism." He even goes as far to say, "When mobs take it upon themselves to try, condemn and punish, it is a destroyer of a government that patriots have died to create and defend." Such rhetoric bespeaks a national paranoia that the system itself could conceivably be overthrown at any moment. Fear of insurrection and revolution was at an all-time high in the mid-1930s. The demeanor and attitude of the mob itself reflect this fear. The disenfranchised masses are shown to be the perfect breeding ground for agent provocateurs. The grown men who spend their days in a bar are unemployed and ready to "have some fun" at the expense of the jailed man.
Rewriting Weimar
The change from Mob Rule, the original title of Norman Krasna's screenplay, to Fury indicates that Lang is no longer interested in the mob's action alone but in the discourse of intense, destructive rage itself -- a rage that envelopes the victim as well. As Orestes in Greek mythology was hounded by the vicious and merciless Furies, who demanded his blood for his mother's, so too are the perpetrators of the mob pursued by Joe. By likening Joe to an avenging God, Lang adds a mythological profundity to this American fable that harks back to his use of myths in his German films. Even the semi-documentary M, for instance, ended with a tableaux of three Norns. 20 In Fury, the lynch mob and Joe are mirror images of each other, each demanding punishment for an imagined crime. In addition, Joe exacts retribution for the destruction of his ideals and his belief in a world of respectable bourgeois decency: "They lynched what mattered to me - my liking people and havin' faith in them." Lang creates a chilling portrait of the mob's exultant rage when he shows a woman's rapturous grin as she whirls the igniting torch into the gas-soaked pyre at the jailhouse door. The film shows her hysterical vengefulness twice, thus underscoring its importance: once, as it happens, and a second time as it was captured by the newsreel camera and presented as evidence in the courtroom. Joe exhibits a similar exhilaration when he listens intently to the radio broadcast of the trial of the 22 citizens about to be sent to the electric chair. He in fact orchestrates the prosecution from behind the scenes and consciously frames the defendants. His brothers are right when they tell him that he has become as morally debased as the lynch mob.
20. See Anton Kaes, M (London: bfi, 2000) 76.
In structural terms, Fury resembles Lang's two-part Nibelungen film, his most "German" film, which premiered in 1924. The film's first part portrays the innocent Siegfried (whose "natural state" is symbolized by his half-naked torso and his youthful impetuousness) as he becomes entangled in the treacherous civilization of the Burgundians. A displaced person unable to fit into the new surroundings, he soon falls victim to betrayal and cold-blooded murder. At the end of Siegfried, Kriemhild swears not to rest until Siegfried is avenged. The film's second part, aptly named Kriemhild's Rache [Kriemhild's Revenge], ends with a 45-minute bloody battle between the men of King Etzel (whom Kriemhild married to implement her revenge plans) and the Burgundians under Hagen. Embodying the relentlessness of the mythological Furies, Kriemhild stands, rigid and motionless, and orders burning torches to be thrown into the building in which the last surviving Burgundians were hiding. Soon the entire building is engulfed in flames, not unlike Joe's jail. In both films Lang cuts between close-ups of ecstatic faces of flame-throwers eerily illuminated by the fire, and long shots of the burning structures. Lang uses the same chilling iconography of conflagration in the filming of Germany's national epic and in his first American movie. The ancient apocalyptic image of the world in flames had found its theatrical embodiment in Richard Wagner's Gotterdammerung, the last part of his four-part opera, Ring des Nibelungen. Lang carries myth and legend over into his American films. In this sense, Fury is a remake of Nibelungen in American disguise -- but also with important differences. First of all, none of the crimes actually had fatal consequences (although they could have): Joe did not get killed because an explosion accidentally freed him from his cell, and the townspeople are not sent to the electric chair because Joe confesses to being alive. The fateful inevitability of the Nibelungen saga is alluded to, but the audience is in doubt only in the period between the fire of the jailhouse and Joe's sudden appearance at his brothers' house. Unlike Siegfried, Joe escapes his fate, and unlike Kriemhild, he stops the revenge before it is too late. Lang places a huge premium in his American film on the individual's power to decide. Although Joe is driven to madness by his lust for revenge -- the film shows this in a hallucinatory dream scene reminiscent of avant-garde film in its montage of superimposed images -- he still makes the rational decision to come forward and save the lives of his would-be murderers. Humanitarian ethics and the rule of law triumph over self-destructive impulses and demonic omnipotence. Nevertheless the film's undergirding is the endless mythical cycle of murder and revenge: revenge justifies new murders which in turn need to be revenged by murder. The trauma of his near-death cannot be overcome, it can only be compulsively revisited, even vicariously, by inflicting it on others. How can the fury of revenge be stopped?
Joe's plan illustrates -- not without irony -- that the rule of law itself is no guarantor against base instincts of revenge. Had he not intervened, the court would have had to execute the defendants for deliberate murder. This shows Lang's ambivalence regarding the vagaries of law and justice -- a motif that he had already examined in M and that he would not tire of investigating further in his American films.
Fury followed Metropolis by ten and M by five years: all of them explored the deadly force of mobs. In Metropolis, the exploited and debased working class is shown in the tradition of Gustave Le Bon's mass psychology as fickle, irrational, and self-destructive when given the wrong orders. Following a demagogic woman, the workers destroy their machines and flood their own living quarters. When they are told what they have done, they just as quickly turn against their leader and burn her like a witch at the stake. As in the end of Kriemhild's Revenge, Lang brings out the atavism of an enraged crowd, culminating in the fiery destruction of human life.
Like Maria in Metropolis, who is modeled after the Polish-born Rosa Luxemburg, the instigator of the violence in Fury comes from outside the community and is depicted as a half-criminal character. The conversion scene is similarly shot in both films: close-ups of the rabble-rouser alternate with close-ups of representative physiognomies of those who need to be converted. In Fury, Lang's tracking shot (much like the kangaroo court in M) moves across the various faces and adds a dynamic to the scene that soon explodes into a common resolve. The camera captures the glimmer in their eyes, the restlessness, and the bodily synchronization when the decision to murder is made. Because the camera is kept at eye-level with the crowd, almost an active participant itself, the proximity of faces and bodies inspires fear. The commotion is contagious. The camera first divides the profilmic space into isolated faces, then pulls back and surveys the scene to show a mob that can no longer be contained. It spills outside the bar and advances toward the jailhouse.
Fury reworks M in American terms. Both films deal with men who become marked as forces dangerous to the community, forces that need to be identified and eliminated. Both films also examine the emergence and brutal practices of a vigilante mob. But the differences are telling: while Peter Lorre's character is set apart from others by his physique and voice, Spencer Tracy's Joe epitomizes the common man. While the criminals' court in M mockingly upholds the rule of law, the upright citizens of the small town of Strand burn down a jail and intend to kill the alleged perpetrator. While Lorre in M is predominantly shown as the victim, Joe turns into a ruthless avenger. However, the court in both cases fails, only to be replaced by vigilante justice.
Imagined Alliances
In his interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Lang mentions a scene in the original script of Fury that had to be cut. It was meant to characterize Joe as a patriotic character eager to defend America against criticism. The script states: "Someone in the audience abuses the Americans as 'sheep' and Joe retaliates aggressively: 'I suppose it wasn't the people who made this country what it is today?', at which an elderly black man leans forward and says to Joe: 'Brother, you ought to get around more,' On the way out, Joe shouts to the black man: 'If you don't like it in this country why don't you go back where you came from?' to which comes the answer: 'Not me, Buddy. I came from Scranton, PA!'." 21
21. Quoted in Lotte Eisner, Fritz Lang (New York: Oxford UP, 1977) 166.
This scene again alludes to the exilic discourse of not belonging, ironically suggesting that blacks are exiles in American society and thus echo Joe's own outsider position. His remark also seems to associate criticism of the American way with people not born in the United States. In the film, this scene was cut because, in Lang's words, "the late L.B. Mayer allegedly had said, 'Colored people can only be used as shoeshine people or as porters in a railroad car.'" 22 Nevertheless Lang uses black actors in more roles than one, slyly inflecting the issue of not belonging with a specifically American racial tension.
22. Bogdanovich 190.
As if to follow the studio boss's crude admonition, Lang shows a black shoeshine man in the barbershop. While buffing the shoes of the reactionary customer, he becomes an unwitting (and unacknowledged) witness to the shocking ignorance of whites when it comes to the American Constitution. He is placed at the bottom of the frame, almost invisible, but for the discerning eye he is clearly, though silently, present. Another scene subtly parallels Joe's fate with that of American blacks. 23 When Catherine reads Joe's letter, romantic music plays in the background. She switches off the radio and instead hears a black woman outside singing a spiritual blues song from the south. Black neighbors in the next yard also listen to her, as she sings about "finding a happy home where the darkies will be free" -- an echo of all exiles in search of a home where they find freedom.
23. A similarly striking moment occurs in Douglas Sirk's (i.e. Detlef Sierk's) 1956 melodrama Imitation of Life. Sara, a young light-skinned African American girl who passes as white and hates her mother for the color of her skin, is shown among all-white girls in a classroom. The teacher explains how Santa Claus is celebrated differently in various countries. Just as she is about to explain the German custom, "In Germany...," there is a knock and a black mother stands in the doorway, asking the baffled teacher for Sara so she can give her the lunch that she had forgotten. A reaction shot shows Sara mortified because at this moment her ruse of passing as white is brutally exposed. This is a pivotal scene in the film's narrative that raises the following question: Why is it that exactly at the moment when you expect Germany to be the topic, an African American person enters? This subtle substitution might suggest a secret, imagined affinity between German exiles and American minorities in terms of their double status of being both inside and outside. The scene is further complicated inasmuch as the film name Sara is not innocent either -- in Nazi Germany after 1939, the name "Sarah" was added to the given name to indicate a female Jew. Thus a nexus of Jew/German/Exile/African American is evoked to connote them as excluded and not-belonging, as outsiders and victims.
The most revealing appearance of the suppressed subject in this film -- black lynching -- occurs as the mob gathers strength. We see a young black man washing a car outside the bar. The film then cuts to an interior shot where we see the men increasingly agitated. Just as the lynch mob begins to form, the camera cuts to the outside and captures the black man listening in. When the doors suddenly fly open and the crowd spills out, he jumps aside in fright to make way for the whip-cracking white men in pursuit of Joe. This is a telling gesture. Although African-Americans were historically the main victims of lynchings, Lang was instructed by the studio to make the victim white. But he was not afraid of giving numbers. Joe's lawyer speaks of "6010 lynchings in the last forty years in the United States." It was not a secret that most of those lynchings were racially motivated. Lang only needed to allude to it by this visual marker of a black man jumping aside -- the split second sufficed to remind the audience of the real tragedy to which Fury only sub-textually refers. These politically sensitive questions are not addressed; they are nevertheless silently posed in the film and impossible to ignore. Lang's ploy paid off -- the reviews referred to his film as a picture about lynching, 24 and the presence of African Americans in supporting roles was enough for the audience to trigger associations with black lynchings.
24. See, for instance, Frank S. Nugent in his very positive New York Times 6 June 1936 review of the film: "Mr. Krasna's story, elemental in its simplicity, is yet an encyclopedia of lynch law. It permits us to study this great American institution from every angle and from points of vantage provided by Mr. Lang's unquestionable camera genius. We see it as the victim sees it, as the mob sees it, as the community sees it, as the law sees it, as the public sees it. We see a lynching, its prelude and its aftermath, in all its cold horror, its hypocrisy and its cruel stupidity; and it disgusts us and fills with shame for what has been done, and is being done, in our constitutional republic."
Although Lang's visual strategies in Fury of representing mob formation resemble those employed in his German films, the overall import of the mob scenes is anchored in American reality. The lynching of jailed suspects was a frequent and publicly known occurrence in the 1930s. The screenwriter Norman Krasna and Lang may have taken their inspiration from a widely publicized kidnapping and murder incident in San Jose, California, in November 1933. When the body of the victim, the young heir of a department store, was found floating in the San Francisco Bay, a mob of 3,000 citizens stormed the county jail and seized the two men who had confessed the crime. Prison guards stood by as the mob pulled the men from their cells and hanged them on trees in an adjacent park. The Governor of California not only refused to prosecute the main instigators of the mob, he even praised the lynching as a warning to all future kidnappers. 25 The lynching was a major social event and people from as far away as San Francisco drove two hours to San Jose to be part of this lynch mob. "If the people want to kill somebody," the Governor was quoted as saying, "they should be allowed to do so, and he wants to help in the good work. They 'make the laws, don't they?'" 26 With an epidemic of 152 publicly reported kidnapping cases between 1933 and 1938, Joe's kidnapping charge resonated deeply with the audience in 1936. An earlier incident may have provided further details for Fury's fictional treatment of lynching. On September 29, 1919, the front page of the New York Times carried the following headline: "Omaha Mob Fires Court House with Bombs; Lynches One, nearly Lynches Mayor." The crowd broke into the court house and set it on fire; as in the movie, the mob cut every line the firemen had laid from nearby hydrants. In the resulting chaos the lynch mob caught their intended victim, William Brown, an African-American who had been arrested on suspicion of having assaulted a 19-year-old girl, and killed him.
25. This incident has become the subject of a well-researched book by Harry Farrell, Swift Justice. Murder and Vengeance in a California Town (New York: St. Martin's, 1992). He reports that in 1943, photographs of the lynch victims' dangling corpses were used by Hitler's propagandists to illustrate American barbarism.
26. See editorial, "A Fine Lesson," New York Times 28 Nov. 1933. See also the two-inch headline "Mob Lynches Hart Kidnapers [sic]. Citizens Storm Jail, Overpower Officers," San Jose Mercury Herald 27 Nov. 1933.
In the mid-1930s, as Lang embarked on Fury, American papers were filled with stories about mob violence -- all of which must have appeared to him as nightmarish real-life enactments of scenarios he had created in the 1920s in such cinematic fictions as Metropolis and M. The vicious mobs, as depicted in these films, had taken on real-life dimensions in Germany with Nazi thugs inciting the populace against Jews and Leftists. Confronted with reports of racial mob violence in his new country, Lang revisited the issue of mass mobilization and mass psychosis, demonstrating that even American democracy cannot protect itself against fascist impulses.
A precursor of later film noir, Fury transfers decisions of law and justice from the authority of the state into the personal realm. It is his conscience that torments Joe to the point of madness. The film shows this in an Expressionist scenario: after Catherine demands that he reveal to the court that he is alive (in order to let the accused go free), Joe storms out of the room to the sound of thunder and runs through the empty streets, displaying symptoms of paranoia. The film first cuts to a scene of almost comical contrast: a Bavarian beer hall with musicians wearing Lederhosen and people dancing to polka music. He sits by himself, drinking from a stein, surrounded by empty tables. The camera exaggerates his isolation with a high angle long shot, placing him on the side of the frame. He beckons the waiter to ask for bourbon (the beer, he says, is too weak), but is told that it is against the law to serve hard liquor without a license. Joe asks for the check, explaining it is too noisy anyway. "I don't like crowded places," he comments, subtly referring to the lynching. This brief scene not only allows the German subtext to assert itself like a memory flash, it also points to the German presence in the United States. In 1936, the parodistically folksy German setting of this scene alluded to the activities of German-American organizations like "Teutonia" in the Midwest, that renamed itself the "National Socialist Union" after 1933 -- merely one of several American Nazi organizations that were intent on upholding German customs (like drinking beer and dancing polka) and mobilizing the German "minority" for the Fuhrer. 27
27. See Robert Edwin Herzstein, Roosevelt & Hitler: Prelude to War (New York: Paragon House, 1989), especially the chapter, entitled "Nazis in America: The Fight against Assimilation" (136-49). The best-known Nazi organization in the United States was the "German-American Bund" under the "Fuhrer" Fritz Kuhn. In 1937 the American Nazi Party claimed 200,000 members.
After his hurried exit from the beer hall, Joe begins hallucinating and hearing voices. Reverting to Expressionist techniques from the 1920s to visualize Joe's subjectively distorted perspective, Lang shows phantomic pictures of the defendants (Joe's victims) reflected in shop windows. As he hastens through the city, Joe hears Catherine's voice. Lured by loud Dixie Jazz, he enters a bar, but finds it eerily deserted except for a jovial black barkeeper who had the radio on. Joe has expected to submerge himself among a crowd to drink and forget his past. When the clock strikes midnight, the barkeeper accidentally pulls two calendar pages, revealing the date as November 22, reminding Joe of the 22 defendants whose lives are in his hands. Joe is startled and runs away. The camera itself (hand-held and using unsettling point-of-view shots) enacts his panic; marching steps and shrill music reminiscent of the mob's march to the county jail chase him until he reaches home, gasping and frantic.
Was Joe imagining things? In a faint echo of Peter Lorre's character in M, who hears whistling where there is none, Joe's paranoia is staged as "hearing voices" that come from no visible place. Five years after his first sound film, Lang is still eager to explore the tension between subjective sound and "objective" image. Graham Greene's panegyric review of Fury praises Lang's technical brilliance in this regard: "Any other film this year is likely to be dwarfed by Herr Lang's extraordinary achievement: no other director has got so completely the measure of his medium, is so consistently awake to the counterpoint of sound and image." 28
28. Quoted in Graham Greene on Film, ed. John Russell Taylor (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972) 85. The review first appeared in The Spectator 3 July 1936. Greene also calls Fury "the only film I know to which I have wanted to attach the epithet of 'great'" (84).
The Insider as Outsider
It is an often-mentioned fact that with the exception of Warner Brothers, none of the large Hollywood studios had a strong interest in addressing Germany's fast slide into Nazism. No films dealt with the rising anti-Semitism in Europe and in the United States. It may have been the fear that engagement in this issue would confirm the stereotypical accusations that Hollywood was dominated by Jews and foreigners. Though Sinclair Lewis' famous novel It Can't Happen Here was successfully adapted for stage, the film adaptation was never made. MGM, which had bought the rights, feared a backlash against Hollywood's purported anti-American bias. Another hurdle was the Production Code Association, chaired by Joseph Breen, with its demands that movies not wallow in sex, crime, or politics. 29
29. In the case of Fury, Breen wrote to L.B. Mayer, the producer, on August 26, 1935 that the story is "satisfactory" from the point of view of the Production Code but that special care should be given to "a) the formation and action of the lynching mob; b) that the actual kidnappers are apprehended and punished; c) that there be no travesty of justice or the courts." See unpublished letter at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library.
Topical social problem films were only a small part of the prodigious production of the major studios. Social problem films covered prison life (I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, 1932), gangsters and the underworld (Little Caesar and Public Enemy, 1931; Scarface, 1932); yellow journalism (Five Star Final, 1931), labor unrest (Wild Boys of the Road, 1933; Black Fury, 1935), and vigilante justice (Star Witness, 1931). Lang's Fury was the first film to take on lynching as a social problem, shortly followed by other films on the same issue: Mervyn LeRoy's They Won't Forget (1937); 30 Charles Coleman's Legion of Terror (1936) and Archie Mayo's The Black Legion (1937). The latter two deal with the Ku Klux Klan-like Black Legion, a secret fraternal society operating in the Midwest in the thirties whose program was to translate social discontent into a murderous rage against foreigners, Jews, and "Un-American leftists." 31 The films are based on actual vigilante murders.
30. This film about lynching was first offered to Lang. He declined not wanting to be pigeon-holed as the director who specializes in lynching films.
31. For an historical account on the emergence and practices of one of these branches of the Ku Klux Klan, see Peter H. Amann, "Vigilante Fascism: The Black Legion as an American Hybrid," Comparative Studies in Society and History 25.3 (July 1983): 490-524.
It is in this context that Fury gains new significance. Like Black Legion, Fury begins with a disclaimer: "The events and characters depicted in this photoplay are fictional and any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental." Such text, which also introduced the gangster films of the early 1930s, usually meant the film addressed a social problem to which the audience could immediately relate. Lang's film was a semi-documentary of the brutal lynching in San Jose in 1933 and a contribution to the larger discourse about the danger of American fascism. It did not say what censorship prohibited; instead it showed in narrative displacement what could not be shown directly.
In Fury's courtroom scene, we are made to listen to the culprits in court as one after another uses false alibis, each one covering up for the next and committing perjury. Even the sheriff claims he does not recognize any of the 22 townspeople who stormed the prison and burned it down. When pressed by the prosecutor to answer who the perpetrators were, he says: "It must have been men from out of town." The prosecutor mockingly agrees with him "Oh I see: foreigners." He turns around to address the jury: "I will remind the jury of the easy habit of putting on foreigners events that disturb our conscience." Again Lang uses the dialogue to highlight what he saw as an American habit of scapegoating foreigners without proof -- another stinging critique that resonated in 1936 with the trial of Bruno Hauptmann. If Lang thought the American justice system was at fault in executing the German immigrant, he made it glaringly obvious in Joe's case. Although neither Hauptmann's guilt nor his innocence have ever been established to this day, the fact that he was of German origin led to a new surge of anti-foreigner and especially anti-German sentiments. The prosecutor's warning in Fury that "foreigners" should not automatically be blamed for all American ills would immediately have been understood. References to outsiders run throughout the narrative. Joe identifies with the homeless dog that follows him. (Similarly, Peter Lorre in the 1940 film Stranger on the Third Floor identifies with a stray dog.) Later, when Joe is arrested, the Sheriff says to his assistant, "take care of this stranger, Frank." Joe's gentleness, his childlike awkwardness around his fiancee, and his harmless habit of eating peanuts endear him to the spectator in the first half of the film. This makes his transformation into the ruthless avenger even more shocking.
Film as Witness
On February 1, 1935, a new series of short subjects, called "The March of Time," opened in New York. Launched by Henry Luce of Time Magazine, the March of Time documentaries, which followed an eponymous radio program, reached a weekly audience estimated at twenty million in over nine thousand American theaters during the peak of their popularity between 1936 and 1942. The March of Time programs, which played until the arrival of television in the early 1950s, filmed political as well as social events, blurring the line between factual reportage, politically engaged documentary, and filmed fiction. At an average of 20 minutes they were longer than newsreels and often devoted to only one topic. They reported about fascist politics in Germany and Italy and opened American eyes to the world. 32 Wherever masses congregated, the March of Time camera men were there, recording the events and making them available to all movie-goers in the nation. There were film theaters devoted only to showing newsreel features from morning to night in an endless loop. Joe may have visited one of those after he escaped the fire to watch his own lynching. He tells his brothers who look at him as if he had come back from the dead: "You know where I have been all day? In a movie. Watching a newsreel. Of myself getting burned alive. I watched it ten times or twenty maybe, over and over again, I don't know how much. The place was packed. They like it. They get a big kick out of seeing a man burned to death -- a big kick!" Trapped as a traumatized victim in a repetition compulsion, the film allows him to revisit the moment of shock "over and over again."
32. See Raymond Fielding, The March of Time, 1935-1951 (New York: Oxford UP, 1978). A major controversy erupted when Harry Warner, the only early voice in Hollywood speaking out against Nazism, refused to allow any Warner theater to show the March of Time newsreel Inside Nazi Germany (1938) because he considered it to be pro-Nazi. See Fielding 187-201. See also Michael E. Birdwell, Celluloid Soldiers: The Warner Bros. Campaign against Nazism (New York: New York UP, 1999).
Lang alludes to film as a new tool in the public sphere when he cuts to a team of newsreel cameramen filming the mob in action. They are giddy with enthusiasm about the "great shot" when, from the safety of a balcony above the masses, they capture the violent commotion. Suddenly the cameraman declares: "Oh, the film is gone." He changes the film reel, while his assistant tells him: "Be sure you use that hypersensitive film ... and give me the two-inch lens." This pause in the filming and the subsequent brief exchange speak volumes: while the newsreel lays claim to an authentic and objective recording of an event, the audience knows that a camera cannot record the entire event for the simple technical reason that film stock runs out. What if a decisive moment was missed during the reloading of the camera? What we see is not only dependent on technology (the speed of the film and the power of the lens), but also on lighting and framing, on the camera's distance from the action and its chosen angles, as well as on editing. In this way photography and film are not infallible, passive and impassioned eyewitnesses. Lang is aware of the problematic nature of photography's claim to the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Nevertheless, he is determined to show how this documentary footage has evidentiary value for the prosecution in that it helps to prove the identity of the perpetrators beyond a reasonable doubt. The presence of a camera has the power of persuasion and establishes the participants of an event, as the Rodney King beating showed, even though the interpretations of the recorded incident may be highly divergent. 33
33. See Avital Ronell, "Video/Television/Rodney King: Twelve Steps beyond the Pleasure Principle," Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 4.2 (1992): 1-15.
As the citizens of Strand collectively resort to perjury, it seems as if the whole town might for lack of evidence get away with murder -- until in a coup the prosecutor projects a newsreel that was secretly shot during the riot. Once the room is darkened and the screen pulled down, the film within the film begins: the images give silent but irrefutable testimony. In Fury, the jury becomes a film audience, as the audience in the theater becomes a jury. The prosecutor freezes the frame in stop action to point out each of the perpetrators with a clarity that (despite its media-specific distortions) trumps any human eyewitness account. The viewer is shown the criminal action twice -- first in real time, when the events unfold, and then again as evidence in court. 34
34. Lang's only film in French exile, Liliom, shot in the period between The Testament of Dr. Mabuse and Fury, also contains a trial scene that uses film as a flashback to establish inconvertible evidence. Liliom is forced to watch himself as he hits his wife. Courtroom movies that use filmic images as evidence go back as far as 1907 when Falsely Accused! was shown. On the structural affinity between courtroom and movie theater, see Carol Clover, "God Bless Juries!" in Refiguring Film Genres, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: U of California P., 1998): 255-77. See also Louis Schwartz, Mechancial Witness, Moving Testimony: Film and Video Evidence in the United States Courts (Iowa Dissertation: 1999).
Upon closer analysis, it becomes obvious that the newsreel used as legal evidence has point-of-view shots and close-ups that could not have realistically come from the news camera that we see at work in the film. 35 Lang is less concerned with verisimilitude than with the film's power to convince and convict. It may have been his (and every Nazi refugee's) dream to see film function as the ultimate witness for the crimes against humanity committed in Hitler's Germany. It may have been his wish that all Nazi atrocities would be faithfully recorded on film so that the future would know the perpetrators and the courts would have proof beyond doubt. The exiled filmmaker endows filmmaking with juridical effectiveness and ethical urgency -- film is not just entertainment but has the power to document history, set the record straight, and condemn the guilty. (The effect of this scene pre-figured post-Nazi Germany, when the Allies forced ordinary Germans to confront the crimes they committed.) 36 Not only are they seeing it, but they are seen seeing it. There can be no doubt that they are guilty. The affirmation of the filmed evidence also suggests that no man is beyond the watchful eye of society. The insistence on the gravity of movies, both as a vehicle for enlightenment and as evidence for the judicial process, may also be Lang's defiant message for his studio bosses who did not believe in political films.
35. See Jean Douchet, "Dix-sept plans," in Le cinema americain, ed. Raymond Bellour (Paris: Flammarion, 1980) 201-32; see also Christa Blumlinger, "Geschichtsverlauf und Bildstillstand: Zu Liliom von Fritz Lang," Osterreichische Zeitschrift fur Geschichtswissenschaften 8.4 (1997): 542-55.
36. See Lawrence Douglas, "Film as Witness: Screening Nazi Concentration Camps before the Nuremberg Tribunal," The Yale Law Journal 105 (1995): 449-81. Orson Welles uses film-within-film projection of documentary footage from the liberation of concentration camps as evidence of Nazi atrocities in his feature film The Stranger (1947). This scene raises many questions about the iconicity of Holocaust images then and now, about the evidentiary nature of documentary film, and the blurring of the line between factuality and fiction. See further Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism's Photo Synthesis (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999), esp. 59-63; Cornelia Vismann, "'Rejouer les Crimes': Theater vs. Video," Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 13 (Spr. 2001): 119-35.
The word "memento" is pronounced and spelled by Joe as "mementum." Catherine never tires of correcting him, and it is this recurring error (ironically an instance of "bad English" -- something exiles could well relate to) that eventually blows his cover and gives him away. A "memento" is both a reminder and a warning -- just like Lang's Fury itself, which both preserves the exilic experience and engages critically with the host country's politics. While it is true that very few of the European filmmakers coming to Hollywood between 1934 and 1941 made films about exile per se (their status as foreigners was not something they wanted to flaunt), I would claim that the experience of exile is the historical unconscious of many of their films, the text below the text.
Especially the genre of film noir, to which, not surprisingly, many German filmmakers in exile were drawn, deals with dislocated people in big cities that are dangerous and impenetrable. These films address betrayal and insecurity, nostalgia and trauma, the noir sensibility perfectly stages the experience of exile. Films like Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard, Lang's Scarlet Street and Big Heat, and Robert Siodmak's The Killers tell stories of men who are driven from their home; displaced and vulnerable, they resemble exiles in their status as outsiders. The American crime film of the 1940s provided an appropriate generic site where questions of memory, displacement, split identity, moral ambiguity, and questions of law and justice could be addressed. The exiles utilized, poached and often refashioned the existing visual and narrative language in order to complicate the didactic moral universe of the gangster film and to articulate a sense of alienation, paranoia, and failure they might have felt in the foreign country. Noir itself was an unusual phenomenon within the American studio system, a place of alterity where the American dream of happiness and progress was openly challenged and replaced by a darker view of man's existence. It was the perfect medium (mostly in the B-movie category) to explore the exiles' fears and anxieties in an impermeable environment, but it also enabled exile filmmakers to express disillusionment with their adopted country.
Lang's Fury had shown the way to comment on both the old and the new homeland. The "double focus" Lang employs on the political level (addressing fascist practices in Germany as well America) is reinforced on the narrative and visual level. His story radicalized the status of the displaced exile by intimating that everyone, even the most upstanding American citizen, could, at a moment's notice, be deprived of his Constitutional rights -- even of his right to live. Refugee filmmakers from Nazi Germany brought with them a heightened sense of those rights and made films to remind us of what is at stake.
Article copyright New German Critique, Inc.
My Research
