The Big Screen by David Thomson Page A

I am inclined to believe this story in that it goes to the core of Lang’s undermining gaze. He is never more disturbing than in his hollow happy endings.
    Then, all of a sudden, he was seized by demonic energy and in the next few years he made the three-hour Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler (1922) and the three-hour film of Die Nibelungen (1924), which includes Siegfried and Kriemhild’s Revenge . Lang’s evolving style was not as strictly expressionist as that in Caligari , though he was prepared to use that manner sometimes. But his visual appetite (as if famished) fed upon studio settings, the intricate traps in décor and artificial light. He became increasingly interested in the geometry of the city, and there are few kinds of exhilaration in silent film to match the frenzy of activity in the Mabuse films. Lang was steeped in pulp adventure literature and he knew that films had to be about lines of sight—seeing and being seen. So doors open, cars halt side by side at a traffic light, men watch women—the intersection is that of friction, and usually it leads to explosions.
    This exhilaration extends to the character of Mabuse, one of the first movie villains who had won at least half the heart of his maker. Lang would say that Mabuse represented all the chaos and wickedness of Germany in the 1920s, plus the coming evil of Hitler and his gang. But as a director, Lang could not take his eyes off the mechanics of plotting—Mabuse is a writer, a storymaker, a would-be director. Sometimes he is seen in bed, surrounded by scattered pages.
    Cinema seldom loses or kills off its monsters: Kong could fall off the spire of the Empire State Building one year, but then his son would be back. Mabuse was a character who lasted Lang from the 1920s to the early 1960s, and if he is mad, it is a marvel that sanity can find him so interesting—unless you share Lang’s Germanic instinct that there is something like a heightened death watch in cinema. The good guys in Lang and a thousand other films are so banal, so bland, until they are exposed to the temptation of going astray. In one of Lang’s Hollywood films, The Woman in the Window (1944), Edward G. Robinson is a solid, bourgeois citizen who dreams himself into a criminal situation.
    Lang went to America in 1924 to open Die Nibelungen (a very classy production, building to a storm of battle and massacre). It’s hard to believe he wasn’t flirting with American offers. His reputation had soared, and Hollywood was greedy for continental talent. Ernst Lubitsch had been recruited only the year before to make Rosita with Mary Pickford, and when Lang got to Los Angeles, he spent time with Lubitsch, admiring his house and his pool and picking up Hollywood gossip.
    Later on, as he amended his own history, Lang would say it was the sight of New York—the skyscrapers, the canyon streets, the density of a modern city—that most excited him. However, he did not explore the chance of making a film in those real canyons. He preferred to rebuild the idea of a modern city, at Ufa, with Metropolis (1927). And when he visited California, he observed a crucial difference between the two countries: Doug Fairbanks told him that American films were about stardom, so Lang decided that in Germany the director should be the star. He came back, apparently without an offer, saying, “They build things big in America. There’s enough space. And Paradise has been created.”
    Not that Lang knew too much about that condition. In 1919, apparently, he had married a girl named Lisa Rosenthal. Not much is known about her—some say she was a hospital nurse; others claim she was a cabaret dancer; some believed she was Jewish. Later on, Lang gave no help to researchers and was inclined to forget Lisa. Why? Well, sometime in 1920, Lisa Rosenthal came back to their apartment one day and found Lang making love with Thea von Harbou. Thea was a leading