Inspired, as she so often is, by James Wolcott, the Siren would like to offer her own Department of Corrections. You may wonder why the hell she bothers. Well, there's her general cussedness and her regard for Hollywood history. And a grudge--the last time the Siren tried to rise to a point of order at Libertas, pointing out here that Darryl Zanuck did not edit Wuthering Heights, she was ignored. And she got irked. So she is taking her ball and going home, to her own blog. Here are offered some points of refinement to this post at Libertas.
The piece has already been cleaned up to eliminate a sentence about Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse that implied that the film was made in Hollywood (the "das" and "des" evidently being insufficient clues) and that Fritz Lang left Germany in part to escape "third world poverty." However, the new paragraph is not much of an improvement. (Grammar and punctuation are left as in the original, because the Siren hasn't got all day.)
1933 was a year when filmmakers like Fritz Lang were brave enough to face up to the threat of anti-Semitism and totalitarianism within their own native Germany. Lang not so subtly made out the villain of “Mabuse” to be a Hitlerian criminal mastermind - one who like the Bin Ladens of today thrives on chaos and terror - and his film was banned by the Nazis as a result. When Fritz Lang was forced to flee Germany[1] shortly after making this film - Hollywood took him in [2] - along with numerous other talented German emigres like Billy Wilder[3], Josef von Sternberg[4], Ernst Lubitsch[5], Marlene Dietrich[6], William Wyler[7] - and they went on to enjoy highly successful careers in America.[8] Hollywood at that time was a place filled with those who had fled persecution[9] and third world-level poverty[10] — filled with those who appreciated freedom and understood that liberty was worth fighting for. The left often tries to co-opt these older films;[11] twisting the subtext to suit a current agenda; but these filmmakers were true artists whose brilliance and subtlety allows an audience to see what they want — a talent lost on todays insecure message makers.
1. Although Mabuse had indeed been banned, by his own account Lang was fleeing a job offer, one made by Joseph Goebbels himself. Lang claimed he turned down the chance to run UFA studios. Lang declined and went to Paris, and he seems to have been able to take most of his money with him. Also, Lang was Austrian, born in Vienna.
2. Actually, France took him in. Lang made Liliom there and arrived in Hollywood shortly afterward.
3. Austrian, although Wilder did in fact flee Hitler, in 1933.
4. Also Austrian. Born in Vienna, spent much of his childhood in New York. Came to take up a contract with Paramount Pictures in 1930, before the Nazis came to power.
5. Came to Hollywood, at the invitation of Mary Pickford, in 1922.
6. Came to take up a contract with Paramount in 1930, along with Sternberg.
7. Arrived in 1920, at the age of 18, after being offered a job at Universal Studios by his cousin Carl Laemmle. By that time his birthplace, in Alsace, was part of France.
8. Lang's Hollywood career nose-dived in the early 1940s, after an attempt at a musical bombed, and again in the early 1950s during the blacklist era. As his agent famously told him, "There's no blacklist, but you're on it." After a forced hiatus ended with his personal plea to Harry Cohn, Lang returned to brilliant form with films like The Big Heat. But his legendarily difficult temperament caught up with him, and by the end of the decade he returned to Germany after the offers in Hollywood dried up.
9. We'll spot the writer this one and assume he is talking about some of the studio founders and people like Wilder and Bertolt Brecht.
10. With the exception of von Sternberg, who grew up poor in New York as well as Vienna, none of the people named in this article grew up poor, and the use of "third world" here is a dreadful anachronism.
11. While she does not contend that Marxist readings of Mabuse do not exist, the Siren has tried mightily, but can find no examples on the Web at the moment. Indeed, some question whether Mabuse is all that political at all. Most Web sources say that Lang's politics were unexceptionally liberal small-d democrat. She does note, however, that a capsule review touting a bin Laden analogy for a 1933 film is, perhaps, not the ideal place to discuss left-wing critics "twisting the subtext."
We just got through with Spring Break at the Siren's house, which meant mucho time playing puppet theater and story time at the library and multiple showings of, god help me, Piglet's Big Movie. Not much blogging time. But funny we should mention von Sternberg, because the Siren did get a chance to view one of his movies, Macao--or at least, Macao is part von Sternberg. It is also part Howard Hughes, part Nicholas Ray, part noir, part musical, part travelogue and all weird. More to come.