Film Review
Whilst they are all too easily overlooked, the films that Fritz Lang
made during his stint in Hollywood represent some of the director's
best work and provide a pleasing continuation of his early
expressionistic masterpieces.
House
by the River is one of Lang's most chilling and technically
accomplished films of this era, an atmospheric crime drama that
skilfully combines the aesthetics of 1940s American film noir thriller
(at its best) with Gothic melodrama. The shadow-laden sets,
satanically eerie score and moody high-contrast black and white
photography serve to create a sustained impression of menace and
paranoia, attaining jolts of sublime terror at the story's most
dramatic moments. Whilst the plot is ludicrous in parts (the
denouement is laughably contrived but shockingly effective), Lang's
direction is never less than flawless throughout and the film is easily
one of his most disturbing and compelling contributions to the art of
cinema.
As in Lang's previous two great films,
The Woman in the Window (1944)
and
Secret Beyond the Door (1948),
House by the River succeeds because
it goes way beyond the clunking mechanics of its B-movie plot and takes
us deep into the troubled mind of the main protagonist, this time a
megalomaniac writer who is incapable of restraining his baser
impulses. Louis Hayward's portrayal of the writer is gloriously
lacking in subtlety, but the way that Lang films him and slices up the
action (inserting cut-away shots that have something of the ferocity of
a knife attack) give him a heightened reality and menace. Stephen
Byrne is not merely a wicked, self-absorbed opportunist; he is someone
who is entirely at the mercy of events, as incapable of controlling his
destructive impulses as he is at determining the course of events once
he has committed the cardinal crime of murder. The river that
runs past his house is not only central to the plot, it is also a
potent visual metaphor for the psychological and moral forces that will
propel him to his doom. Throw a dead body into a river and of
course it will return to condemn you.
It is interesting that Lang had originally envisaged casting a black
actress for the part of the murder victim, but was forced to abandon
the idea by over-cautious studio executives. Whilst this was
undoubtedly a missed opportunity, the film still has a profound
resonance with the McCarthy anti-Communist paranoia that was sweeping
America at the time, most visibly in the slightly comical trial scene
in which an innocent man (the murderer's crippled brother) is accused by
an embittered servant (the parallel with the courtroom scene in Arthur
Miller's
The Crucible is
striking). The playfulness of the trial sequence distracts from
what it is really saying about contemporary America, namely the mania
for finding easy scapegoats for the country's social and economic
ills.
House by the River
is not only a darkly compelling study in mental derangement - a
companion piece to Lang's early sound masterpiece
M
(1931) - it is also a subtle and damning piece of political commentary
on America in the early 1950s.
© James Travers 2013
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Next Fritz Lang film:
The Big Heat (1953)
Film Synopsis
Stephen Byrne, a young American writer who is keen to make a name for
himself, lives with his wife Marjorie in a house set on the banks of a
river. One afternoon, whilst his wife is away visiting friends,
Stephen makes advances towards his attractive servant, Emily, but
accidentally strangles her when she protests. His brother John
turns up unexpectedly and reluctantly agrees to help Stephen dispose of
the body in the river. John is disgusted when his brother
attempts to capitalise on Emily's mysterious disappearance to promote
his next book but he unwittingly becomes the prime suspect when the
dead woman's body is discovered. Fearing that his brother will
betray him, Stephen decides to arrange his suicide...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.