Fritz Lang’s America

June 21–August 11, 2019

This lineup of Lang’s films made and set in the United States amounts to a noir tour of the psychosocial landscape of twentieth-century America, a land of systemic corruption, thwarted aspiration, and frustrated desire.

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The Big Heat
You and Me
The Woman in the Window
Clash by Night
Fury

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Past Films

The Big Heat
Fritz Lang
United States, 1953
Digital Restoration
Friday, June 21 6:30 PM
A noir masterpiece, and not a pretty picture, as cop Glenn Ford prowls the underworld for his wife’s killers. Gloria Grahame delivers a memorable performance as the girlfriend of brutal gangster Lee Marvin.
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Human Desire
Fritz Lang
United States, 1954
Wednesday, June 26 7 PM
Lang’s remake of Renoir’s La bête humaine stars Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame (both from The Big Heat) as a Korean War veteran and the sultry femme fatale who leads him toward his doom.
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Fury
Fritz Lang
United States, 1936
Archival Print
Sunday, June 30 7 PM
Lang’s first Hollywood film stars Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sidney in a powerful indictment of mob justice. A vivid social melodrama with many visual elements of Expressionism-turned-noir.
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You and Me
Fritz Lang
United States, 1938
Wednesday, July 3 7 PM
George Raft and Sylvia Sidney are ex-cons employed in a department store in this Brechtian/Runyonesque fairy tale, with music by Kurt Weill.
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You Only Live Once
Fritz Lang
United States, 1937
Archival Print
Sunday, July 7 5 PM
Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney are outlaw lovers on the run in this much-loved classic, a film of “tragic intensity and visual creativity” (Andrew Sarris).
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The Woman in the Window
Fritz Lang
United States, 1944
Friday, July 12 8:30 PM
A mild flirtation draws a college professor (Edward G. Robinson) into a hopelessly tangled web of blackmail and murder in Lang’s claustrophobic noir. “A thriller with the logic and plausibility of a nightmare” (Pauline Kael).
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Scarlet Street
Fritz Lang
United States, 1945
Archival Print
Friday, July 19 6:30 PM
A middle-aged cashier and amateur artist (Edward G. Robinson) finds himself caught between a bewitching beauty (Joan Bennett) and a psychotic thug (Dan Duryea) in one of Lang’s most visually intense works, inspired by Renoir’s La chienne.
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Secret Beyond the Door
Fritz Lang
United States, 1948
Archival Print
Friday, July 26 6:30 PM
A recently married woman (Joan Bennett) begins to suspect her new husband (Michael Redgrave) is after her life in Lang’s take on the woman-in-peril gothic melodrama. “Lang’s direction is masterly. . . . A remarkable film” (Time Out).
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Rancho Notorious
Fritz Lang
United States, 1952
Sunday, July 28 7 PM
Arthur Kennedy searches for the bandit who killed his fiancée, and finds Marlene Dietrich, in this brilliantly curdled western-psychodrama.
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Clash by Night
Fritz Lang
United States, 1952
Saturday, August 3 6 PM
A killer cast—Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Ryan, Marilyn Monroe—star as fated misfits in Monterey. A classic noir, shot on location, “brisk, tense, crackling” (Los Angeles Times).
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Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
Fritz Lang
United States, 1956
Archival Print
Friday, August 9 6:30 PM
A crusading newspaperman hopes to prove the cruelty of capital punishment—by framing himself for murder—in Lang’s last, low-budget, nihilistic noir. Dana Andrews and Joan Fontaine star.
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While the City Sleeps
Fritz Lang
United States, 1956
Archival Print
Sunday, August 11 7 PM
Ida Lupino, Dana Andrews, and George Sanders star in one of Lang’s personal favorites, in which big-city newshounds fight over a (literally) killer scoop. “Examined America’s unquenchable lust for greed, power, and corruption . . . a movie ahead of its time” (San Francisco Examiner).
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Fritz Lang’s America

June 21–August 11, 2019

Leaving Nazi Germany for Hollywood in 1935, Fritz Lang left behind the epic superproductions of his Weimar-era career (featured at BAMPFA last winter) but brought the angst and shadows of German Expressionism with him to California, where, along with other European emigres, he helped to hone what was later dubbed film noir. This series consists of films both made and set in the United States; here, Lang replaced the cosmopolitan crime syndicates, science fiction, and mytho-historical subject matter of his German films with stories of thwarted aspiration and frustrated desire played out in suffocating small towns and alienating urban environments that reflected the psycho-sociopolitical landscape of contemporary America. His first American film, Fury, was an aptly titled expression of anger at homegrown vigilante injustice, and for the next twenty years he explored the psychological fallout of systemic inequality, corruption, and crime. Lang’s flawed protagonists are all but helpless in the face of social forces that have created them, and despite whatever resistance they muster, they are ultimately compelled to meet their fates. But still they try to defy the limitations that society dictates: from Sylvia Sidney’s determined ex-con in You and Me to Edward G. Robinson’s bank teller and aspiring painter in Scarlet Street to Gloria Grahame’s gangland survivor in The Big Heat, Lang’s American films are full of unforgettable characters whose interior struggles are as palpable as the material ones they face in life.

Kate MacKay, Associate Film Curator

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Thanks to Chris Chouinard, Park Circus; Kristie Nakamura, Warner Bros. Classics; David Jennings, Sony Pictures Entertainment; Daniel Bish, George Eastman Museum; Mark Balsam, Shout Factory; Lynanne Schweighofer, Library of Congress; Jason Jackowski, NBC Universal; Mark McElhatten, Sikelia Productions; Dana Hillyer, Swank Motion Pictures; and Mark Johnson, Harvard Film Archive.