Oxon Hill After suffering from a bit of the blahs, due to missing my cabin and spending a bit too much time in the distracted city, I’ve regained my appreciation – for whatever reason – for the texture of city life again. Yesterday a friend lured me away from a successful day of writing to go to the movies. I took the J to the Lower East Side and waited at Essex Street for either the F or the M – which go the same place but there run on two different tracks. I came to a tacit and utterly simple and beautiful understanding with a Hispanic woman who was also waiting for either train. She was watching the M platform from a stairwell, and listening for the F. I took up a spot where I could see the F platform, and also see her. We smiled at each other indicating that we had the situation covered. The M came first, she inclined her head, and I went her way.
concavely Walking down Houston Street there were vast deep puddles at fully fifty percent of the streetcorners, causing no end of consternation to the elderly, the prissy, and the fashionably shod. It was pleasant to find so much grexing at the corners, I enjoyed seeing how everyone took it. Then I arrived at the Film Forum. They don’t take reservations for double features, so people were all steaming there as quickly as they could to make sure they got tickets. It was Friday night and everyone was in their dressed-up winter clothes. I got the tickets and waited for my friend, who I was happy to see. We sat through two Fritz Lang movies – our first ever double-feature. Twelve-fifty for four hours of entertainment, who can beat that?
The films, The Big Heat and Human Desire, were part of a “Fritz Lang in Hollywood” retrospective. They were not necessarily profound movies, but they were brusque and forceful. I had been reading The Decameron on the trip in and I was struck by the resemblance. Boccaccio is not deep either: but he offers all the pleasure of real story, where death, murder, revenge, adultery, betrayal, and horror are merely expected elements of anything life-sized.
The first movie, The Big Heat, was a straight-up Noir about a good cop taking on a corrupt system, disgusted by the “rabbits” who care only for their personal material benefit. All are punished accordingly – those with integrity for their integrity, those without it for their lack of it. (Lang it is said was deeply influenced by his Catholicism). I am always impressed by good Noir movies: the crisp dialogue, the bizarre lighting and expressionist tableaux, and the incredibly fast-moving plots. I remember a film critic lamenting how Star Wars changed the pacing of movies, an utterly bogus claim when you see how these Noir films piled up bodies, affairs, and betrayals one after another over the course of ninety minutes or so. The plots are incredibly difficult to recount later because of their speed and complexity.
The second movie, Human Desire, was based on a Zola novel and was far simpler in conception, being the story of a woman and three men: her former lover, her husband, and her new lover whom she attempts to use to rid herself of her husband. But the emotions – though dealt with quickly – are complex. The wife’s current lover is an odd display of human psychology: he has just gotten back from Korea and is working his old job again, and he states that after watching people kill each other in war now all he wants is peace and quiet – to work at his job and to go fishing. He finds a young girl utterly willing to give him a happy version of that life, but he instead chooses to involve himself with the far more intriguing married woman. The wife’s psychology is a thing of note as well: at the end of the movie she notes how much she respected her former lover who treated her as a convenient whore: “If I were a man I would have done exactly the same thing to a woman like me. I respected him for it.”
I’m certainly hoping to catch another double-feature before the run is done. And Lang is the director of the movie Metropolis, which I have never seen – it’s not in this run – but came through the Ziegfeld just this past fall. Doing an image search gives a sampling of its unusual and evocative visual language.
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