Commissioned by DVD Beaver, and published by that site in February 2010. I’ve updated or added a few links, delighted to report that all the unavailable items can now be accessed in some form or another.I was inspired to repost this after just reseeing Sternberg’s sublime Dishonored in Criterion’s handsome new Dietrich and Von Sternberg in Hollywood box set. I’ve also just reseen the lovely if politically incoherent Shanghai Express in the same package, and I wonder if it’s possible that the relative neglect accorded to Dishonored, by cinephiles and academics alike, may have something to do with the fact that it’s the Hollywood feature of Dietrich and Von Sternberg that has the most to say about the real world — not only because it begins and ends in Vienna, but also because, as an antiwar statement that a prostitute can do more for her countryman than a female spy can do for her country, it has the most effective strategies for combining genre elements with personal fantasies and moral convictions, in part through its diverse metaphors regarding art (Dietrich’s piano playing as it serves both passion and state) and glamor (a sword blade used as a makeup mirror in the final scene).
Ever since the Gene Siskel Film Center decided to revoke the press pass it had assigned me for 37 years, apparently on the assumption that my money had become more important to them than any of my past or present critical support, I’ve been attending far fewer of their programs, and am currently still debating with myself whether I want to spend $13 plus travel expenses to see a new restoration of Edward Yang’s Taipei Story on New Year’s Day, especially if that entails rewarding their selfishness. But fortunately, I don’t have to contend with such mercenary/capitalist greed, at least on the same level, when I’m at home. The following cost me far less, financially and emotionally:
We Were Strangers (1949) is a film maudit in more ways than one. Look up its title in the index of the Library of America’s Agee on Film volume and you won’t find any trace. But look up Strangers — an imaginary title that must have emerged from a faulty Life edit cutting the full title from Agee’s essay about Huston and then failing to correct the abbreviated version meant to follow the full one. And then a lazy LOA editor and/or indexer perpetuated this error by pretending that Huston made a movie entitled Strangers—a Borgesian stunt that adds a new title to Huston’s filmography.Read more
This appeared in the August 16, 2002 issue of the Chicago Reader. I more recently had occasion to return to this film and some of my thoughts about it when I joined David Kalat to do an audio commentary on the expanded (and now nearly complete) version of Metropolis for the English DVD of Masters of Cinema. In fact, the essay below was used by Masters of Cinema in the accompanying booklet of their previous edition of the film, and an updated version of this piece appeared in the next one. — J.R.
Metropolis
**** (Masterpiece)
Directed by Fritz Lang
Written by Lang and Thea von Harbou
With Gustav Frohlich, Brigitte Helm, Alfred Abel, Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Fritz Rasp, Theodor Loos, and Heinrich George.
The internationalism of filmic language will become the strongest instrument available for the mutual understanding of peoples, who otherwise have such difficulty understanding each other in all too many languages. To bestow upon film the double gift of ideas and soul is the task that lies before us.
We will realize it! — Fritz Lang, in an article published in 1926
Lang’s utopian rallying cry, written in Germany during the editing of Metropolis, is well worth recalling today. Read more
It’s delightful to have Kino’s new “deluxe” edition of Albert Lewin’s Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, one of my all-time favorite examples of Hollywood romanticism, glamor, and lushness (as well as Technicolor), based on the film’s 2009 restoration, which I saw and Bologna and wrote about a little over a year ago. But while watching this edition’s extended comparison of the original with the restored version, I’m somewhat taken aback by the fact that the film I remember seeing in 1951, when I was still in grammar school, is closer to the unrestored version:
It’s obvious that the restored version is superior in terms of definition, lighting, and color. But rightly or wrongly, I remember the film in 1951 as being darker, at least in my mind’s eye — a film bathed in black more than auburn hues.
Could this be a matter of Proustian self-deception? Or could it point to a significant change in the film that I originally saw? I wish I knew.[7/8/10]
