Arm's length

The title is confusing, right? It reads like Captain America is the Winter Soldier. But he isn’t. The Winter Soldier is some guy with grunge hair and something like one of those masks they put on digs who bite people. A nasty piece of work, he’s a killing machine: insistent, determined, affectless, walking doom. Anton Chigurh with a super-powerful metal arm. I don’t think he blinks. He and Captain America face off several times in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which obviously should have been called Captain America Versus The Winter Soldier. Anyway, it’s long. 136 minutes long.

It’s also, for at least half of the movie, action-packed and fairly engaging. Not unlike Captain Phillips, Captain America takes on pirates. Samuel L. Jackson tells a story about his elevator operator grandfather that I quite liked. Scarlett Johansson jumps around and kills people while wearing really tight pants. There are deftly staged chase scenes with many crashes and explosions. Then we get to this turning point that’s entirely dependent on a dopey conspiracy theory that suggests the evil Hydra organization is somehow behind every act of malfeasance over the last 60 years, and are days away from launching an evil scheme to kill millions of hapless citizens for nothing other than the possibility of their future crimes. A Minority Report kind of thing, but on an apocalyptic scale. Big themes: free will versus pre-determination, the perils of a world in which algorhythms are taken as the word of God, and so on. But even within the comic-myth-logic of the movie, things start getting way too silly and excessive.

In the previous instalment we learned how Steve Rogers became Captain America during World War II. He got injected with a special serum that made him really muscular and sped up his metabolism—this is before those sports doping scandals—and kicked Nazi ass. Then he got frozen and woke up in 2011, but they really don’t explore the Rip Van Winkle thing anywhere near enough. Captain America’s the opposite of Batman in that he’s very earnest and un-cynical, but like Batman he’s more souped-up-man than superman. Which is what makes parts of Captain America: The Winter Solider so annoying. Captain America seems invincible, and invincible is boring. Dude leaps out of airplanes without a parachute, seriously? Winter Soldier seems invincible too. Everyone seems invincible, except Robert Redford, because—spoiler alert!—he’s an evil psycho Nazi prick. I suppose they want to “give you your money’s worth.” It gets wearisome. 

              

Days when every shrub poses a threat

A man alone in a room, waiting in the gloom, unnervingly still, watching the clock on the wall. On the wall behind the man, the man’s shadow hovers close, doubling him, looming, succubus-like, ready to follow the man when, once the clock strikes six, he rises from that chair and leaves Lembridge Asylum.

What story shall we tell? One of the truly delicious things about the opening moments of Ministry of Fear (1944) is that it’s so saturated with forbidding mood and transfixing ambiguity that it seems it could go anywhere, could become any number of stories. The story that it does become, one of geopolitical intrigue, deadly pursuit, paranoia, betrayal, mystery pastry, and guilt, is dizzyingly dense with plot—and with plots—and, to my eyes and ears, a deeply satisfying, dream-like suspense film. Certain elements are very much of the time, with Nazis aplenty, yet the film feels out of time, of any time—its eeriness is timeless. Oddly enough, you get the impression that this timelessness, this careful drawing upon anxiogenic symbols from the collective unconscious, is precisely what Graham Greene, whose novel provided the film with its source material, didn’t like. And he claimed that Fritz Lang, the film’s director, didn’t like it either. Perhaps because, at that time, it seemed so important to make Ministry of Fear, like Lang’s Man Hunt (1941) and Hangmen Also Die (1943), an explicitly anti-Nazi picture—Lang was a self-exiled German—and the film’s Nazis simply weren’t Nazi enough: no secret chambers adorned with swastika flags or giant portraits of the Führer, no maniacal speeches about world domination. Fair enough, I suppose. But what we have in the place of a rallying cry for the Allies is a wildly evocative, exquisitely designed, utterly entertaining nightmare. The film is now available on DVD and Blu-ray from Criterion.

That man in the room is Stephen Neale. One of the first people he encounters is a fortune-teller, who seems to be waiting for him. She wants to talk about the women in his past, something that makes him very uncomfortable—Neale did time in Lembridge after being found guilty of “mercy killing” his ailing wife. Neale’s played by Ray Milland, one of those rare stars who could easily be the hero or the heavy, whose every gesture is perfectly gauged so as to draw us in and alternately earn our sympathies and prompt us to question his reliability. Against the advice of his doctor, Neale opts to head straight to London upon release. A bustling city, and a place upon which bombs could fall at any moment—talk about ominous. Everything in Ministry of Fear is ominous, from the weird din of boisterous laughter that Neale finds in certain crowds to the séance in which the medium speaks directly to him, from the perpetual fog to the sculpted shrubbery to the ladies large-brimmed translucent hats. Lang, as responsible for ushering German expressionism into Hollywood cinema as anyone, accents the unease by keeping the characters most often in the middle distance (that trademark dearth of point-of-view), and by not relying on the musical score in key moments of tension. So many of the film’s scenes are so compellingly strange: a blind man cane-tapping his way through a curtain of steam; two grown men eating cake without plates or cutlery on a train; a carpet of Englishmen sleeping on the floor of a tube station bomb shelter; a tailor (Dan Duryea) dialing a telephone with a giant pair of scissors. Every moment promises something new, some development that might change the course of everything. It’s almost surreal. But haven’t you had days like this? 

            

Sins of the father: Harlan on DVD

In the years following the Second World War, Veit Harlan, darling of the Third Reich and director and co-writer of the notorious propaganda film Jew Süss (1940), was twice tried for crimes against humanity and twice acquitted. Felix Moeller’s documentary Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Süss (2009), now available on DVD from Zeitgeist, is thus less concerned with re-opening the case, so to speak, than enriching our understanding of its consequences by attempting to take measure of that titular shadow, which loomed not only over Harlan’s life, which came to a quiet end in Italy in 1964, but which still looms over the lives of his many descendents. Moeller’s film is less polemic than family portrait, less investigative report than biographical essay. For the most part its value lies in its narrative density, which only accumulates as it goes.

Christiane Kubrick

The Harlan clan forms a diverse and conflicted chorus. On one end of the spectrum we find Harlan’s daughter Maria Körber, who says dad had plenty of Jewish friends so surely he had no anti-Semitic feelings of his own, and who claims that she was forced against her will to cast off her infamous surname when she began her own career in movies—a claim which Moeller situates so as to sound a subtle echo of Harlan’s claim that he was coerced into making Jew Süss, a project “commissioned” by Joseph Goebbels. On the other end we find Harlan’s son Thomas Harlan, who seems to have bore the sins of his father most heavily, who became involved in researching Nazi war crimes and in helping to mount socialist revolutions in Chile and elsewhere. Thomas is probably Moeller’s single-most fascinating subject, his life seemingly one extended, rather flamboyant reaction against his father’s legacy. It’s interesting that chief among Thomas’ grievances is the fact that Veit Harlan returned to filmmaking after his acquittals rather than assume some other profession, as though resigning from filmmaking could have served as a kind of meaningful penance. Of Harlan’s extended family the most notable and articulate testimony comes from his niece Christiane Kubrick, who married the director Stanley Kubrick, who happened to be Jewish, and who, sadly, never managed to fulfill his dream of making a film about Harlan and the German film industry under National Socialism.

Veit Harlan

Chance plays such a haunting role in all this. It suggests that there are two kinds of evil, the kind so potent that it will find an outlet no matter the circumstance and the kind that might never manifest without just the right set of opportunities to prompt it. Harlan’s collaboration could be regarded as an evil of the latter category, which makes the fall-out, for all involved, that much more arduous to draw conclusions from. When rigorously following the threads of the Harlans’ life stories, Moeller’s film is totally captivating. Moeller only runs into trouble when he seems unable to distinguish which threads are most vital to the core of his project—he spends too much time with some of Harlan’s youngest grandchildren, who mostly have little to say, and refers too frequently to scenes from Jew Süss, which, when pried loose from their context can seem misleading. So Harlan is finally a bit overlong and at certain points under-focused, but what’s best in it more than justifies the time invested.

War, torture, and the limits of control: Man Hunt, Time Limit on DVD

The story was already in circulation, how in 1934 Fritz Lang was summoned to a meeting with Joseph Goebbels where he was offered the position of Führer of the German film industry; how Lang, whose Jewish heritage Goebbels presumably wasn’t aware of, whose ex-wife, screenwriter and actress Thea von Harbou, had already joined the Nazi party, then fled Germany immediately with nothing but the clothes on his back. The story’s so perfectly in keeping with the pursuit narratives Lang favoured. Its likely at least partially apocryphal, but anyway makes a hell of a great set-up for Man Hunt (1941), the thriller Lang made for Fox, newly available on DVD, that opens with Walter Pidgeon lining Hitler up in his sights on the cusp of World War II. Like Powell-Pressburger’s 49th Parallel (41), Man Hunt was a rallying cry for Americans to enter the war, and it was that much more persuasive for being helmed by this visionary Viennese director who had abandoned a dazzling career in the very country he was urging his new homeland to attack.

Based on Geoffrey Household’s novel Rogue Male (39), the film concerns big game hunter Alan Thorndike (Pidgeon), captured by SS guards after being found perched on a cliff near Hitler’s Obersalzberg home with rifle in hand. When Thorndike eventually escapes, Hitler’s Security Commander (George Sanders) relentlessly pursues him as he returns clandestinely to England, determined to get Thorndike’s signature on a statement claiming the British government ordered the assassination. Yet not only was Thorndike not given any such instructions, he wasn’t actually trying to kill Hitler at all. The rifle wasn’t even loaded. A proud sportsman, Thorndike just wanted to know if he could do it. So Man Hunt becomes the story of how one man comes to understand the Nazi threat, takes responsibility, and returns to the hunt with guns now loaded.

There are some distractions, especially with accents. Pidgeon, the Brit who sounds suspiciously Canadian, and Sanders, the German who sounds suspiciously English, actually fair better than Joan Bennett’s thinly veiled London prostitute. She’s the only one to bother attempting an accent appropriate to her character, though her broad Cockney grates like a rusty lawnmower. Fortunately she’s still lovely, sensual and sassy in spite of her character’s poutiness, and has some touching scenes with Pidgeon, who treats her more like a niece that the lover she wants to become. But Lang’s exemplary staging and camerawork is finally the reason to see Man Hunt: his beautifully rendered inserts; his exquisite use of silence and shadow; his subtle motifs, such as Pidgeon’s forest footprints echoed later by marks left on a floor by his feet when dragged out of a Nazi torture chamber; his haunting compositions, such as those involving water and night especially, or the tree-enveloped deep-focus scene that plays out in a single shot with Pidgeon stumbling away from the Nazis who hunt him through the dense Obersalzberg wilderness.

Moving ahead in time to reflect on America’s involvement in Korea and, indirectly, Hollywood’s ensnarement in the red scare, Time Limit (57) is another allegory involving responsibility, torture and the limits of patriotism. It concerns a former POW accused of collaboration with the communists whose refusal to defend himself prompts a conscientious military investigator to look deeper into his case. The title refers both to the pressure placed on the investigator to speed the ostensibly open and shut case along, and to the psychological limits upon which even the most formidable soldier breaks down and becomes malleable to the enemies’ dictates. The film came out during a time when brainwashing was an increasing concern, one that fed directly into the ideological paranoia of the Cold War.

Time Limit was the only film ever directed by character actor Karl Malden, who took on the project at the suggestion of the film’s star and producer Richard Widmark. Malden had by then firmly established himself as one of Hollywood’s most dependable talents, and his reputation is reflected in the pedigree of his collaborators. Besides the inimitable Widmark, who plays the investigator, the film also features excellent turns from Dolores Michaels as a stenographer who manages to be both sexy and smarter than most of her superiors, a very young Rip Torn in his first credited film role, a very vulnerable Richard Basehart as the guilt-ridden POW, and Martin Balsam, who as a desk Sergeant bullying Widmark to court-martial Basehart and get it over with, embodies the virtual flipside of the character he played that same year in 12 Angry Men. Cinematographer Sam Leavitt, who often worked for Otto Preminger, was behind the camera, which shifts seamlessly between the actors, who are the utter focus of Malden’s clean, crisp approach.

MGM’s DVD’s not great. The aspect ratio’s been reformatted and there isn’t even a menu. But the transfer looks sharp enough and the film itself is sleek and engrossing. It also speaks very much to this mentality that’s loomed over us these last several years, one that says treason is so heinous a crime that mere accusations equal culpability, while ignoring the fact that love of God and country is not itself enough to withstand the frailties of our minds when driven to their outermost limits.