The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (235 page)

Martin Landau
, b. Brooklyn, New York, 1928
Three times, between 1988 and 1994, the dankly enduring Martin Landau was nominated as best supporting actor: for
Tucker
(88, Francis Coppola); as the odious adulterer in
Crimes and Misdemeanors
(89, Woody Allen); and (his winner) as Bela Lugosi in
Ed Wood
(94, Tim Burton). His Lugosi was, beyond dispute, a daunting recreation thrust into the midst of an eccentric movie. It was, as such, rather more assertion than acting. But Landau’s Bela did have the side advantage of making one forget the sheer unlikability of Mr. Landau. Perhaps a similar peace descended on the actor himself.

Landau, as he admits, has been around a long time—and not just on TV in
Mission: Impossible
(1966–69), in which he played with his wife, Barbara Bain. He had been a newspaper cartoonist before becoming an actor, and he is a longtime member of the Actors Studio.

Yes, that is him, as one of the sadistic heavies, “Leonard,” in
North by Northwest
(59, Alfred Hitchcock). He has also done
Pork Chop Hill
(59, Lewis Milestone);
The Gazebo
(60, George Marshall);
Stagecoach to Dancer’s Rock
(62, Earl Bellamy);
Cleopatra
(63, Joseph L. Mankiewicz);
The Greatest Story Ever Told
(65, George Stevens);
The Hallelujah Trail
(65, John Sturges);
Nevada Smith
(66, Henry Hathaway);
They Call Me Mister Tibbs
(70, Gordon Douglas);
A Town Called Hell
(71, Robert Parrish);
Black Gunn
(72, Robert Hartford-Davis);
Strange Shadows in an Empty Room
(77, Martin Herbert);
Meteor
(79, Ronald Neame);
Without Warning
(80, Greydon Clark);
Alone in the Dark
(82, Jack Sholder);
The Being
(83, Jackie Kong);
Cyclone
(87, Fred Olen Ray);
Sweet Revenge
(87, Martin Sobel); and so to
Tucker
.

Paragraph break to mark a film you’ve heard of—and some reason for appreciating Landau’s teary gratitude for a nomination after all that dross. Then:
Trust Me
(89, Bobby Houston);
Paint It Black
(89, Tim Hunter)—not exactly released; good in
Mistress
(91, Barry Primus);
Sliver
(93, Phillip Noyce);
Intersection
(94, Mark Rydell);
City Hall
(96, Harold Becker);
B.A.P.S
(97, Robert Townsend);
Rounders
(98, John Dahl);
The X-Files
(98, Rob Bowman);
Ed TV
(99, Ron Howard); the old man in
Bonanno: A Godfather’s Story
(99, Michael Poulette); Geppetto in
The New Adventures of Pinocchio
(99, Michael Anderson);
Sleepy Hollow
(99, Burton);
Ready to Rumble
(00, Brian Robbins);
Very Mean Men
(00, Tony Vitale); Abraham on TV in
In the Beginning
(00, Kevin Connor);
The Majestic
(01, Frank Darabont);
Hollywood Homicide
(03, Ron Shelton); as Joseph Krauzenberg, trying to buy freedom from the Nazis, in
The Aryan Couple
(04, John Daly);
An Existential Affair
(06, Peggy Bruen);
David & Fatima
(08, Alain Zaloum);
City of Ember
(08, Gil Kenan);
Billy: The Early Years
(08, Robby Benson).

Diane Lane
, b. New York, 1965
Diane Lane is past forty-five now, and for beautiful actresses who have not quite made it yet, or kept their power, being thirty-five-plus leaves you in hopes of getting a movie like
A Walk on the Moon
(99, Tony Goldwyn), a project too small to afford a major star. So Diane Lane got the chance of the vacationing mother who falls in love with “the blouse man.” It was her best role—so much fuller than the “big” parts she got in the 1980s, and it showed how much the actress had learned. And don’t forget the beauty, even if it turns out to be the last good movie she gets.

Her parents divorced only days after she was born. But Lane coped and was into pictures as a teenager: famously on a
Time
cover in
A Little
Romance
(79, George Roy Hill), with Laurence Olivier;
To Elvis, with Love
(80, Gus Trikonis); with Amanda Plummer in
Cattle Annie and Little Britches
(80, Lamont Johnson);
National Lampoon Goes to the Movies
(81, Henry Jaglom and Bob Giraldi);
Six Pack
(82, Daniel Petrie);
Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains
(82, Lou Adler);
The Outsiders
(83, Francis Coppola);
Rumble Fish
(83, Coppola);
Streets of Fire
(84, Walter Hill);
The Cotton Club
(84, Coppola).

Then a three-year break before
The Big Town
(87, Ben Bolt);
Lady Beware
(87, Karen Arthur);
Priceless Beauty
(88, Charles Finch), with Christopher Lambert, her husband;
Vital Signs
(90, Marisa Silver);
My New Gun
(92, Stacy Cochran);
Indian Summer
(93, Mike Binder);
Knight Moves
(93, Carl Schenkel);
Judge Dredd
(96, Danny Cannon);
Wild Bill
(95, Hill);
Mad Dog Time
(96, Larry Bishop);
Murder at 1600
(97, Dwight Little);
The Only Thrill
(97, Peter Masterson);
Grace and Glorie
(98, Arthur Allan Seidelman);
The Setting Sun
(99, Tomono Ro);
My Dog Skip
(00, Jay Russell); on TV in
The Virginian
(00, Bill Pullman);
The Perfect Storm
(00, Wolfgang Petersen), grieving from shore;
Hardball
(01, Brian Robbins);
The Glass House
(01, Daniel Sackheim);
Just Like Mona
(01, Joe Pantoliano); still gorgeous in
Unfaithful
(02, Adrian Lyne); and carrying the flimsy but pleasant
Under the Tuscan Sun
(03, Audrey Wells).

She passed forty with ease:
Fierce People
(05, Griffin Dunne); with John Cusack in
Must Love Dogs
(05, Gary Davis Goldberg); as Toni Mannix in
Hollywoodland
(06, Allen Coulter);
Untraceable
(08, Gregory Hoblit);
Jumper
(08, Doug Liman);
Nights in Rodanthe
(08, George C. Wolfe);
Killshot
(09, John Madden).

Fritz Lang
(1890–1976), b. Vienna
1919:
Halbblut; Der Herr der Liebe; Die Spinnen, part 1: Der Goldene See; Hara-Kiri
. 1920:
Die Spinnen, part 2: Das Brillanten Schiff; Das Wandernde Bild; Vier um die Frau
. 1921:
Der Müde Tod/Destiny
. 1922:
Dr. Mabuse der Spieler, parts 1 and 2
. 1924:
Die Nibelungen, part 1: Siegfried; part 2: Kriemhilds Rache
. 1927:
Metropolis
. 1928:
Spione
. 1929:
Frau im Mond
. 1931:
M
. 1932:
Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse/The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse
. 1933:
Liliom
. 1936:
Fury
. 1937:
You Only Live Once
. 1938:
You and Me
. 1940:
The Return of Frank James
. 1941:
Western Union; Man Hunt
. 1943:
Hangmen Also Die!
. 1944:
The Woman in the Window; The Ministry of Fear
. 1945:
Scarlet Street
. 1946:
Cloak and Dagger
. 1948:
Secret Beyond the Door
. 1950:
House by the River; American Guerrilla in the Philippines/I Shall Return
. 1952:
Rancho Notorious; Clash by Night
. 1953:
The Blue Gardenia; The Big Heat
. 1954:
Human Desire
. 1955:
Moonfleet
. 1956:
While the City Sleeps; Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
. 1959:
Der Tiger von Eschnapur; Das Indische Grabmal
. 1961:
Die Tausend Augen des Dr. Mabuse/The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse
.

Whether in the futuristic cities constructed at UFA in the 1920s, the uncompromising urban grids made at various American studios in the 1940s and 1950s, or in the mythic fusion of a real and cardboard India, Lang’s films all seem to have been made in a time of emergency. No other director so convinces us that melodramatic threat of extinction in the crime movie is the metaphor of a much greater danger. His soundstage world is a necessary distillation of realism, a sort of concrete martial law imposed upon troubled constitutions. The tension that justifies this imposition is constantly maintained in Lang’s relentless narrative pace and in the undeflected observation of fear, anger, joy, and action eating into nerves and morality.

Granted that Lang was trained in an idiom that liked to take three hours over a complex thriller, then it was artistically beneficial that in America he was compelled to cut that length in half. Few other directors gained so much from the commercial concentration of plot length. Lang’s determination to film action and reaction allows us to see him simultaneously as a man who might have invented cinema—asking elementary questions about the minimum essential information for an audience, and evolving a taut equation of images to carry it out—and as a great modernist, uncovering the abstract forces of law, conspiracy, violence, revenge, and sacrifice beneath tortuous plots.

Lang’s feeling for narrative function goes straight to the heart of our criminal corporate states.
Mabuse
is a fictional character in advance of historical examples. Lang’s cities were oppressive before actual metropolises frightened us. And it was Lang who described how far society was estranging its nobler heroes, forcing them into crime, vengeful violence, and conspiracies like those of corrupt governments. Look past the melodrama and simplicity of Lang’s films and he is the most stringent of political filmmakers. His analysis of society is structural, architectural, and narrative. But his unblinking commentary on the confusion of moral values and standards of sanity in the world is like that of a philosopher who poses simple examples because he is able to see them leading to profundity.

The son of an architect, Lang was first interested in being a painter and exhibited in Paris in 1914. He was badly wounded in the First World War and began writing scripts in convalescence. His first scenarios were made by Joe May, for example,
Hilde Warren und der Tod
(17), in which Lang played Death. The postwar German pessimism clearly affected Lang, but it is notable that the various ordeals of his own life reinforced his rigorous unsentimentality. Lang foresaw the German trauma of the 1930s, and was nearly overtaken by the way its thugs incarnated the assassins in his thrillers. Instead, he went on to America and began to film the future, a period to which his classical style always aspired.

His German films are long and rococo, but without an ounce of fat.
Die Spinnen
and
Dr. Mabuse der Spieler
are feverishly inventive stories, kept in order by Lang’s selection of visual essentials. Throughout his career there was this same creative tension between teeming events and the minimal necessary account of them. That is why Lang’s films begin in top gear and then advance into higher ratios unknown to other directors. The acceleration is a matter of logic, analysis, and intense stylistic refinement. Behind it lies the assurance that comes from a world built entirely on sound stages and from his ability to make the emotional and moral resonance of interiors so clear.

It was this precise, cinematic care that enabled Lang to avoid the dead ends of Expressionism. It is why, despite the Utopian melodrama of
Metropolis
and the geometrical neatness of
M
, both films came into new life more than forty years after they were made. Invariably in cinema, narrative directness lasts longer than density.

The social argument of
Metropolis
is simpleminded, but the dynamic images of crowd behavior amid an urban labyrinth are still frightening. And it is the organized detachment of
M
that chills, the feeling that a sane man can no longer confidently take sides in the confrontation of society between organized law and outlawry, that Peter Lorre’s murderer is already a protagonist of perverted sensitivity. It was the insight into malign purpose of
Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse
—a more cheerful thriller, but with a blatant portrayal of Nazi manners—that compelled Lang to leave Germany and to go first to France and then to America.

Of all the continental refugees, Lang adapted most naturally to America. The films he made there match his greatest because he found a studio system better organized and more adept at narrative genres. Between
Fury
and
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
there is an achievement still not appreciated in English-speaking circles. The study of the relations between man, society, law, and crime moves toward increasingly uncompromising answers. It is astonishing that
Fury
, made at MGM under the bland Mankiewicz, should contain such an indictment of the mob and so uncomfortable a view of the way violence degrades Spencer Tracy. The moment in
Fury
when Tracy reappears in the doorway cauterized into hostility—“I’m dead … I could smell myself burning”—is the first evidence that the American Lang is to be an advance upon the German.
You Only Live Once
is now recognized as an origin of
Bonnie and Clyde
and
Pierrot le Fou
in its icy view of a vital young couple turned toward crime by a callous, obtuse society.

But the finest Lang films are
The Woman in the Window, The Ministry of Fear, Scarlet Street, Cloak and Dagger, Rancho Notorious
, and
The Big Heat. Woman in the Window
and
Scarlet Street
gain from the fact that their hero—Edward G. Robinson—is depicted in a very homely, bourgeois form so that the turmoil that overtakes him has to be all the more skillfully contrived. In
The Ministry of Fear
and
The Big Heat
heroes have to vindicate themselves in nightmare worlds of conspiracy. They are interior films in which doorways frame and darkness threatens human beings. In
Cloak and Dagger
, espionage seems to coincide with the fallibility of appearance, whereby an apple can explode.
Rancho Notorious
shows Lang’s ability to take the Western genre and strip it of sham atmosphere, landscape, and horses. It is a portrait of a man warped by his own need for vengeance, the theme that Lang pursued so fruitfully for forty years and which was the natural concern of an artist driven from his own country by tyranny.