Word: lange
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...wrong in living with a sense of the twenties and thirties dervied largely from films. The prevalent social movements were depicted by artists possessed of style, social vision, and unshakeable personal morality. Griffith's prohibition film, The Struggle, offers an audience an extraordinary perspective on an era, as do Lang's You Only Live Once, Ford's The Grapes of Wrath, and of course Welles's Citizen Kane...
...Fritz Lang's Fury, twenty-two members of a lynch mob on trial for their lives, presumably cleared by the perjured testimony of their neighbors, are proven guilty by the camera. A newsreel filmed during the height of the mob violence containing the indelible record of their faces is presented in court. The scene is cathartic, as Lang presents the camera per se as an instrument of fate, the omniscient agent of grim truths. It is even more cathartic in its simplicity, for the concept of film-as-evidence recalls the very motives for the genesis of the medium, that...
...churned-out which reaffirm genre as tantamount to cliche and formula, we have Hawks's Rio Bravo or Ford's The Searchers, both of which use genre background as a means of allowing their protagonists the fullest range of individual expression. For all the cheap detective thrillers, we have Lang's The Big Heat with its articulate vision of urban corruption and the need to fight evil, or Nicholas Ray's Party Girl and the fascinating conflicts between man and a hostile environment. Hitchcock's commercial suspense thrillers discuss serious questions of the nature of guilt and redemption; even Hawks...
...submit to you, over the hisses of Wednesday night's audience at the Harvard Square, as the best film yet released in 1968. Chabrol, whose Les Coursins is famous as one of the first accomplished works to emerge from the French nouvelle vague, has had a troubled career resembling Lang's and Welles's. The films after Les Cousins grew increasingly serious, tended toward morbidity, and lost both money and the critics. In order to keep working, he made cheap melodramas, among them Le Tigre Se Parfum Avec Dynamite and Marie-Chantal Contre Docteur Kah, to list the two most...
...general, but only about the way they live." The background of his films show an avaricious and innately destructive world of monstrous and banal people. It is, for the most part, only background, and the films are more specifically about complex relationships and interaction of characters. But where Lang's or Hawks's characters will confront their directors' vision of society-gone-wrong head on, Chabrol's retreat a little from it to defensive personal eccentricities. Both Chris (Anthony Perkins) and Paul (Maurice Ronet) are warped in Chabrolian high-style: bored and restless, willful and given to practical jokes. Chris...