The big heat 1953 - Intense and powerful film noir classic

IMDB Link
IMDB Rating: 8,0

Director: Fritz Lang
Main Cast: Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Jocelyn Brando, Alexander Scourby, Lee Marvin, Jeanette Nolan

"One of the later examples of American film noir, The Big Heat is also one of the genre's most underrated films. Director Fritz Lang utilized many of the elements typical to his other films: unseen yet gruesome violence, relentless pacing, and a hardboiled view of justice and revenge. The sad, realist film has an oppressive feeling of malignity. Glenn Ford is a perfect everyman cop, out for revenge against criminals as well as other cops. In this way, The Big Heat marks a significant transition between the crime movies of two different eras. Prior to the early 1970s, police dramas tended to pit police in very clear opposition to the men in the black hats, with the notable exceptions of On Dangerous Ground or The Big Combo. After the culture shock of the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, films like Dirty Harry, The French Connection and Serpico began an obsession with the ambivalent emotions that make a policeman and his department tick. In many ways, The Big Heat was a precursor for these films, both in theme and tone." - www.allmovie.com

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You only live once 1937 - One of Lang's best American films

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0029808/?ref_=nv_sr_2
IMDB rating: 7,5

Director: Fritz Lang
Main Cast: Sylvia Sidney, Henry Fonda, Barton MacLane, Jean Dixon, William Gargan

"Like his American debut Fury, Fritz Lang's second American feature traces the fate of a man struggling to clear his name after being accused of a crime he didn't commit. A powerful one-two punch, these films both feature a strong sense of social justice, and suggest that Lang was disturbed by the injustice and intolerance he found in the country he adopted after fleeing Nazi Germany. Eddie Taylor (Henry Fonda) is an ex-con truck driver, a 'three-time loser' whose next crime will send him to jail for life. He is determined to go straight, but finds resistance at every turn. His boss fires him over a minor misunderstanding, and he and his new bride Joan (Sylvia Sidney at her most heart-tugging) are kicked out of a motel on their honeymoon when the proprietor recognizes him from a true crime magazine. Things go from bad to worse when he becomes the chief suspect in an armored car robbery and finds himself back in prison again. After being convicted of the crime, he attempts a jailbreak in a fog-enshrouded scene that is one of Lang's most horrific depictions of the cruel ironies of fate. Throughout the film Lang is careful to withhold from the audience whether or not Eddie actually is guilty, but also makes it absolutely clear where his sympathies lie. Eddie is continually at the mercy not only of the mistakes in his past, but also of an uncaring justice system and a frenzied news media that can't wait to see him convicted. Folded into all of this is the desperate, doomed love he and Joan share. A perfectly constructed thriller with a strong social conscience, You Only Live Once is considered one of Lang's greatest American films." - http://www.allmovie.com/movie/you-only-live-once-v55916/

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Fury 1936 - Two lovers... victims of mob violence!

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0027652/?ref_=fn_al_tt_9
IMDB rating: 7,9

Director: Fritz Lang
Main Cast: Sylvia Sidney, Spencer Tracy, Walter Abel, Bruce Cabot

"Not long after he fled Nazi Germany rather than produce films for Hitler, Fritz Lang made his American debut with this powerful drama that it made clear that mob violence was not confined to his homeland. At a time when lynching was still a grim fact of life in America, Fury tackled this social evil head-on; even if MGM seems overly cautious in making both the mob and their victim white, the film's unflinching willingness to look dead-on at the ugly side of the American character is as impressive (and troubling) today as it was in 1936. Spencer Tracy delivers a typically strong 'everyman' performance as the wrongfully accused Joe Wilson, and he doesn't shrink from Joe's less pleasant side in the second and third act, while Sylvia Sidney is genuinely affecting as his tormented fiancée. As Kirby and a band of local rabble trap Joe in his jail cell and then set the building alight, Lang takes the average folks of the American heartland, the sort of people that Frank Capra's populist visions were made of, and shows that a gruesome thread of hatred can be found inside them, waiting for the opportunity to come out. Sadly, this message may remain as pertinent today as it was when Fury first hit screens." - http://www.allmovie.com/movie/fury-v18992/

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Das testament des Dr. Mabuse (The testament of Dr. Mabuse) 1933 - Fritz Lang's masterpiece

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0023563/
IMDB rating: 7,8

Director: Fritz Lang
Main Cast: Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Otto Wernicke, Gustav Diessl, Rudolf Schündler, Theo Lingen, Camilla Spira

"The Testament of Dr. Mabuse was Fritz Lang's second sound film and a sequel to his enormously successful 1922 silent. Mixing several genres including cop drama, mystery, and horror, Lang created a rare hybrid picture full of striking characters and images. Lensed simultaneously in French and German, Testament details a three-pronged story: one about a crime ring run from behind a curtain by the evil Dr. Mabuse, a second about a guilt-stricken member of Mabuse's gang who has fallen in love, and a third about a determined detective who is stumped by the strange case. Marked by Lang's brilliant camerawork, the film connects the dots with a number of excellent scenes that culminate in one incredible sequence that jumps back and forth between two thrilling escapes: a couple trapped in a room with a ticking time bomb and the criminals stuck in another building with cops outside the door. In another memorable scene, a doctor who has connected Mabuse to the crimes is gunned down in heavy traffic when the killers use their horns to provide a noisy cover. The exciting car chase featured in the film's climax - led by the evil doctor in his Mercedes - was one of the first of its kind. Performances are very good across the board, but Otto Wernicke really steals the show as Detective Lohmann, a character Wernicke also played in Lang's 1931 classic M. Rudolf Klein-Rogge is sufficiently creepy in the part of Mabuse (he also played the Mabuse role in Lang's silent Dr. Mabuse), although his performance is limited to a handful of brief scenes and some chilling double-exposure shots in which his spirit steps out of his body to do its evil work. Co-star Rudolf Schündler, who plays the psycho gunman Hardy, later appeared in Dario Argento's Suspiria. Testament was later cut into a 75-minute, dubbed version that was titled The Crimes of Dr. Mabuse. Lang revisited the character of Mabuse in 1960's The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, which turned out to be his final film." - http://www.allmovie.com/movie/the-testament-of-dr-mabuse-v67069

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M 1931 - A city is looking for a murderer

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022100/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
IMDB rating: 8,5

Director: Fritz Lang
Main Cast: Peter Lorre, Ellen Widmann, Inge Landgut, Otto Wernicke

"One of the most distinguished and technically accomplished early sound films, Fritz Lang's M revealed the expressive possibilities for combining sound and visuals, in a metaphorically loaded story about pre-Nazi Germany. Working from the true story of the Dusseldorf child murders, Lang matches a mother's anguished calls for her daughter with images of an empty stairwell and a lost balloon rather than show the killing, while the murderer's obsessive whistling becomes the calling card for his threatening presence. Beyond the use of sound, Lang takes a pessimistic view of German society, using editing to equate the police with the criminals, while Fritz Arno Wagner's fluid cinematography creates a gloomy night world of shadows and paranoid entrapment. Lang's documentary-like attention to the details of the search, combined with the absence of non-diegetic music, matches the stylization with an equally creepy element of realism. The killer may be sick, but the society pursuing him isn't that much better. A worldwide success and a star-maker for Peter Lorre (who is terrifyingly ordinary in the role of the murderer), M influenced movies from those of Orson Welles to the American film noir of the 1940s; Lang himself left Nazi Germany for Hollywood in 1933.
M is revealed as a true classic - a film that shames everything made in its genre since." - http://www.allmovie.com/movie/m-v100745

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