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There was a cake
Yesterday morning at an unnecessary hour thereof, we were woken by a persistent ringing of our doorbell. It turned out to be a driver for FedEx, trying to deliver a package for someone whose name sounded like Alex Pigeon. We demurred. Aside from the postal inaccuracy, we have too much experience of film noir and its adjacent paranoid genres to feel comfortable accepting a package in a stranger's name. Traditional outcomes of this interference of identities include gangsters, chain gangs, navigating London by its stars, and hanging off Lincoln's nose, sparked in some cases by nothing more culpable than hailing a waiter or opening a taxi door. In Fritz Lang's Ministry of Fear (1944), all it takes is a cake.
All wrong-man thrillers have a quality of nightmare, of childhood. They are bewildering, helpless—that isn't your name, it isn't your fault, you didn't do it, it isn't fair. Achieving justice in this world comes sharply second to surviving it. No one has let you in on the rules and everyone else knows the score. Ministry of Fear may be minor Lang, but it's major nightmare. Technically an espionage thriller, it doesn't feel like one: it doesn't just expose the workings of a secret world, it drops its protagonist bottomlessly straight through them. The premise could pass for Hitchcock. Accidentally collecting a MacGuffin from a ring of Nazi spies while just trying to pass the evening at that most English of institutions, a charity fête, a hero with more on his conscience than confusion stumbles into an explosive maze of fifth columnists and Scotland Yard. He even meets a blonde of mysterious intentions, two of them, actually, triangulated with the equally elusive blond man whom the hero unknowingly doubled for and thereby placed himself in the classic doppelgänger danger of being cut out of his own life. But Hitchcock in the '40's would have been more grounded, more explicit; however deliberately the nightmare current runs through guilt-engined films like Foreign Correspondent (1940), Saboteur (1942), and Shadow of a Doubt (1943), even a Freudian experiment like Spellbound (1945) is never entirely subsumed into it. The lineaments of consensus reality can always be glimpsed, if only by the distance of the action from them. Ministry of Fear is practically abstract. Emerging from the enforced peace of the Lembridge Asylum into the galloping insanity of the wide world, Ray Milland's Stephen Neale doesn't know until well into the second act that he's dealing with Nazis, much less that their object is anything as concrete as a roll of microfilm. All he knows is that strangers who seem to be everywhere and know everything about him are hunting him with murderous inexorability for the sake of a cake which he had in his possession for less than five minutes before it was blasted to crumbs by an inopportune V-2. Colloquially as well as formally, it's absurd. It's a ridiculous situation, as surreal as the pair of scissors casually used by a tailor to dial a phone seconds before putting their blades to more conventional, grisly use, as namelessly disturbing as a man with a blind stare feeling his way through a slice of cake as if reading it for secrets. "Forget the past. Just tell me the future." As adapted by Seton I. Miller from the 1943 novel by Graham Greene, the plot is full of twists, but the film itself is slipperier, constantly shifting shape with the queasiness of dreams. A fortune-teller has the same name, but two faces. A man with two names and the same face dies twice, the first time no less plausibly than the second, since in movies the dead can be told by their stillness and the agreement of other actors on their extinct state. Even the séance which seems to break the narrative's nominally mimetic scrim really confirms its capacity for polymorphous dread, since its occult accusations of murder are presented with the same detached certainty as a confession made in the crowded shelter of a tube station. London in the blackout of the Blitz becomes its own shadow side, populated by spectres of the war and of Stephen's past which has weighted him with such ghost-guilt that he does not protest this pursuit as if by furies, waiting for him by right as soon as he set foot beyond the sanitarium's iron-topped walls. He has a peculiar, glassy resilience, absorbing with the equanimity of a slightly battered Tarot fool developments that would send protagonists with greater expectations of a just universe into screaming tizzies. "When I left Lembridge," he recalls with a rueful smile, "I told Dr. Morton I was coming to London to spend a quiet life. It's been like riding down the side of a whirlpool." What throws him near panic is finding himself in the hands, not of the Nazis, but the police. The law in Ministry of Fear offers the barest protection against its counterpart. Retaining a private investigator produces more obfuscation than clarity, trusting a nail-file-wielding inspector leads to a no-hope standoff on a roof full of rain. Without the explanation provided by the novel, the title comes to suggest some malign, more than mortal bureaucracy under whose influence our hero's life has fallen, compassing and constraining his actions to the point where it would make more sense than not if the governing genius of the "Mothers of the Free Nations" were revealed to be Dr. Mabuse. Even the humorous stinger of the finale, so often a chance to send the audience out on a reassuring, tension-dissolving note, here depends on the jolt of horror in Stephen's voice and face. No wonder he's told grimly, "They shouldn't have let you out of that asylum, Mr. Neale." Really, in this melting, motiveless world of bombs for books and little birds divulging secrets, what's the difference if they did?
I had last seen Ministry of Fear at the Brattle in 2012, from which introduction I had retained an overall sense of Expressionism with the official E, the mise-en-scène of blacked-out London which I linked at once with Powell and Pressburger's Contraband (1940), and the concise, climactic, hard image of a white-drilled hole blinking out black. I had remembered almost nothing of the plot and I don't feel bad about it. It isn't the important thing, even though it isn't full of holes; the important thing is how it feels, like a bad dream you can't reconstruct on waking: all that clings is the knowledge of how much it scared you. I can appreciate now that its existential vertigo is personalized by the precisely weird performances of Dan Duryea, Hillary Brooke, Erskine Sanford, Alan Napier, that the art direction by Hans Dreier and Hal Pereira and the cinematography by Henry Sharp effortlessly justify that official E, that even if it is minor Lang because it lacks almost all of the sociopolitical dimensions of his strongest work, it delivers on the dimensions of the title in spades. It never occurred to me to wonder if it was film noir; I just classified it as film Lang. This whirlpool brought to you by my future backers at Patreon.
All wrong-man thrillers have a quality of nightmare, of childhood. They are bewildering, helpless—that isn't your name, it isn't your fault, you didn't do it, it isn't fair. Achieving justice in this world comes sharply second to surviving it. No one has let you in on the rules and everyone else knows the score. Ministry of Fear may be minor Lang, but it's major nightmare. Technically an espionage thriller, it doesn't feel like one: it doesn't just expose the workings of a secret world, it drops its protagonist bottomlessly straight through them. The premise could pass for Hitchcock. Accidentally collecting a MacGuffin from a ring of Nazi spies while just trying to pass the evening at that most English of institutions, a charity fête, a hero with more on his conscience than confusion stumbles into an explosive maze of fifth columnists and Scotland Yard. He even meets a blonde of mysterious intentions, two of them, actually, triangulated with the equally elusive blond man whom the hero unknowingly doubled for and thereby placed himself in the classic doppelgänger danger of being cut out of his own life. But Hitchcock in the '40's would have been more grounded, more explicit; however deliberately the nightmare current runs through guilt-engined films like Foreign Correspondent (1940), Saboteur (1942), and Shadow of a Doubt (1943), even a Freudian experiment like Spellbound (1945) is never entirely subsumed into it. The lineaments of consensus reality can always be glimpsed, if only by the distance of the action from them. Ministry of Fear is practically abstract. Emerging from the enforced peace of the Lembridge Asylum into the galloping insanity of the wide world, Ray Milland's Stephen Neale doesn't know until well into the second act that he's dealing with Nazis, much less that their object is anything as concrete as a roll of microfilm. All he knows is that strangers who seem to be everywhere and know everything about him are hunting him with murderous inexorability for the sake of a cake which he had in his possession for less than five minutes before it was blasted to crumbs by an inopportune V-2. Colloquially as well as formally, it's absurd. It's a ridiculous situation, as surreal as the pair of scissors casually used by a tailor to dial a phone seconds before putting their blades to more conventional, grisly use, as namelessly disturbing as a man with a blind stare feeling his way through a slice of cake as if reading it for secrets. "Forget the past. Just tell me the future." As adapted by Seton I. Miller from the 1943 novel by Graham Greene, the plot is full of twists, but the film itself is slipperier, constantly shifting shape with the queasiness of dreams. A fortune-teller has the same name, but two faces. A man with two names and the same face dies twice, the first time no less plausibly than the second, since in movies the dead can be told by their stillness and the agreement of other actors on their extinct state. Even the séance which seems to break the narrative's nominally mimetic scrim really confirms its capacity for polymorphous dread, since its occult accusations of murder are presented with the same detached certainty as a confession made in the crowded shelter of a tube station. London in the blackout of the Blitz becomes its own shadow side, populated by spectres of the war and of Stephen's past which has weighted him with such ghost-guilt that he does not protest this pursuit as if by furies, waiting for him by right as soon as he set foot beyond the sanitarium's iron-topped walls. He has a peculiar, glassy resilience, absorbing with the equanimity of a slightly battered Tarot fool developments that would send protagonists with greater expectations of a just universe into screaming tizzies. "When I left Lembridge," he recalls with a rueful smile, "I told Dr. Morton I was coming to London to spend a quiet life. It's been like riding down the side of a whirlpool." What throws him near panic is finding himself in the hands, not of the Nazis, but the police. The law in Ministry of Fear offers the barest protection against its counterpart. Retaining a private investigator produces more obfuscation than clarity, trusting a nail-file-wielding inspector leads to a no-hope standoff on a roof full of rain. Without the explanation provided by the novel, the title comes to suggest some malign, more than mortal bureaucracy under whose influence our hero's life has fallen, compassing and constraining his actions to the point where it would make more sense than not if the governing genius of the "Mothers of the Free Nations" were revealed to be Dr. Mabuse. Even the humorous stinger of the finale, so often a chance to send the audience out on a reassuring, tension-dissolving note, here depends on the jolt of horror in Stephen's voice and face. No wonder he's told grimly, "They shouldn't have let you out of that asylum, Mr. Neale." Really, in this melting, motiveless world of bombs for books and little birds divulging secrets, what's the difference if they did?
I had last seen Ministry of Fear at the Brattle in 2012, from which introduction I had retained an overall sense of Expressionism with the official E, the mise-en-scène of blacked-out London which I linked at once with Powell and Pressburger's Contraband (1940), and the concise, climactic, hard image of a white-drilled hole blinking out black. I had remembered almost nothing of the plot and I don't feel bad about it. It isn't the important thing, even though it isn't full of holes; the important thing is how it feels, like a bad dream you can't reconstruct on waking: all that clings is the knowledge of how much it scared you. I can appreciate now that its existential vertigo is personalized by the precisely weird performances of Dan Duryea, Hillary Brooke, Erskine Sanford, Alan Napier, that the art direction by Hans Dreier and Hal Pereira and the cinematography by Henry Sharp effortlessly justify that official E, that even if it is minor Lang because it lacks almost all of the sociopolitical dimensions of his strongest work, it delivers on the dimensions of the title in spades. It never occurred to me to wonder if it was film noir; I just classified it as film Lang. This whirlpool brought to you by my future backers at Patreon.
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Thank you!
As many films of Lang's (and quite a few of Milland's) as I've seen, I can't figure out how I've never managed to see this one.
It's on the Internet Archive! I had remembered weird visual fragments without the narrative tissue, which made the experience even more like revisiting a dream.