It is Fritz Lang’s 1931 film “M” starring Peter Lorre that is cited as one of the first examples of film noir--or at least a major influence in its development. Others point to two Alan Ladd vehicles--The Glass Key and This Gun for Hire--that were released in 1942. Film noir could be described as a "non-genre" genre. As Gary Morris writes in his essay, “Universal Film Noir,” film noir “has inspired arguments of a kind that are hard to imagine in other film genres, or other art forms for that matter. Like obscenity, it’s easy to spot and hard to define.”
Ministry of Fear is classic film noir
Morris also writes that the “genealogy of the genre is enormously varied, with antecedents all over the cultural map…” Nonetheless, Fritz Lang’s noir credentials are solid--from his first sound picture “M” to Ministry of Fear (1944), which the New York Times review of 1945 called, “As eerie a package of mystery as has come along in quite a pretty while…”
And the Times positions Ministry of Fear as film noir when it says that “Lang has given the picture something of the chilling quality of some of his early German shockers--a strangely arch and maniacal surge that comes through suggestive use of camera and morbid pace in more critical spots.”
The plot of Ministry of Fear
After two years in an asylum, Stephen Neale (Ray Milland) has been released and arrives at a train station to await his train bound for London. Visiting a local fair before his train arrives, he encounters a fortuneteller who tells him the correct weight to guess to win a prize cake. After taking possession of the cake, he begins to leave, but another man arrives at the fair and attempts to have Neale give him the cake, but he refuses.
Neale boards the train and a blind man boards at the last moment to share the compartment with him. Being sociable, Neale offers the man a piece of cake. The stranger is oddly crumbling the slice as he eats it. When the train is stopped due to the German air raid bombing at night, he looks out of the window's blackout curtain only to be clubbed with the “blind” man's cane and have the cake stolen. He chases his attacker onto the moor while being fired at. A bomb drops and blows up the thief and the cake. A stunned Neale grabs the gun from the wreckage. And that's only the beginning of Ministry of Fear.
Morris see comparisons with other directors and genres in Ministry of Fear. He sees Ray Milland's character similar to those in films by Alfred Hitchcock--"an ordinary man caught up...in a spy plot that involves seances, murders committed in total darkness, and tittering dowagers who double as secret agents"--and describes a scene in a "godforsaken" meadow outside London that is "reminiscent of Universal's classic horror films." Ministry of Fear, says Morris, has some of the most striking visuals of all film noirs.
MInistry of Fear, which co-stars Marjorie Reynolds, Carl Esmond, Hillary Brooke and Dan Druyea, made an impact upon its release. The New York Times wrote that "Fritz Lang...has kept a curious off-key, spectral tone insinuating through the telling of a thoroughly captivating tale....The clammy and numbing sensations of fear are thereby conveyed in a manner that is quite unusual for our generally overworked screen....[and] the needling of anxiety is sharp."
Sources
- All Watchers.Com Ministry of Fear Movie Review.
- Crowther, Bosley. "Movie Review. Ministry of Fear (1944). The screen; in new film." The New York Times, February 8, 1945.
- Morris, Gary. "Universal Film Noir." Images. Issue 5.
Eric Brothers - Eric Brothers' forthcoming book,The Berlin Ghetto, will be published by The History Press in the U.K. in 2012.
