Fritz Lang’s America

June 21–August 11, 2019

This lineup of Lang’s films made and set in the United States amounts to a noir tour of the psychosocial landscape of twentieth-century America, a land of systemic corruption, thwarted aspiration, and frustrated desire.

Read full description

The Big Heat
You and Me
The Woman in the Window
Clash by Night
Fury

Upcoming
Films
Upcoming
Events
Selected
Objects
Past
Films
Past
Events

Past Films

While the City Sleeps
- Sunday, August 11 7 PM
Fritz Lang
United States, 1956
Archival Print

Ida Lupino, Dana Andrews, and George Sanders star in one of Lang’s personal favorites, in which big-city newshounds fight over a (literally) killer scoop. “Examined America’s unquenchable lust for greed, power, and corruption . . . a movie ahead of its time” (San Francisco Examiner).
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
- Friday, August 9 6:30 PM
Fritz Lang
United States, 1956
Archival Print

A crusading newspaperman hopes to prove the cruelty of capital punishment—by framing himself for murder—in Lang’s last, low-budget, nihilistic noir. Dana Andrews and Joan Fontaine star.
Clash by Night
- Saturday, August 3 6 PM
Fritz Lang
United States, 1952
A killer cast—Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Ryan, Marilyn Monroe—star as fated misfits in Monterey. A classic noir, shot on location, “brisk, tense, crackling” (Los Angeles Times).
Rancho Notorious
- Sunday, July 28 7 PM
Fritz Lang
United States, 1952
Arthur Kennedy searches for the bandit who killed his fiancée, and finds Marlene Dietrich, in this brilliantly curdled western-psychodrama.
Secret Beyond the Door
- Friday, July 26 6:30 PM
Fritz Lang
United States, 1948
Archival Print

A recently married woman (Joan Bennett) begins to suspect her new husband (Michael Redgrave) is after her life in Lang’s take on the woman-in-peril gothic melodrama. “Lang’s direction is masterly. . . . A remarkable film” (Time Out).
Scarlet Street
- Friday, July 19 6:30 PM
Fritz Lang
United States, 1945
Archival Print

A middle-aged cashier and amateur artist (Edward G. Robinson) finds himself caught between a bewitching beauty (Joan Bennett) and a psychotic thug (Dan Duryea) in one of Lang’s most visually intense works, inspired by Renoir’s La chienne.
The Woman in the Window
- Friday, July 12 8:30 PM
Fritz Lang
United States, 1944
A mild flirtation draws a college professor (Edward G. Robinson) into a hopelessly tangled web of blackmail and murder in Lang’s claustrophobic noir. “A thriller with the logic and plausibility of a nightmare” (Pauline Kael).
You Only Live Once
- Sunday, July 7 5 PM
Fritz Lang
United States, 1937
Archival Print

Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney are outlaw lovers on the run in this much-loved classic, a film of “tragic intensity and visual creativity” (Andrew Sarris).
You and Me
- Wednesday, July 3 7 PM
Fritz Lang
United States, 1938
George Raft and Sylvia Sidney are ex-cons employed in a department store in this Brechtian/Runyonesque fairy tale, with music by Kurt Weill.
Fury
- Sunday, June 30 7 PM
Fritz Lang
United States, 1936
Archival Print

Lang’s first Hollywood film stars Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sidney in a powerful indictment of mob justice. A vivid social melodrama with many visual elements of Expressionism-turned-noir.
Human Desire
- Wednesday, June 26 7 PM
Fritz Lang
United States, 1954
Lang’s remake of Renoir’s La bête humaine stars Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame (both from The Big Heat) as a Korean War veteran and the sultry femme fatale who leads him toward his doom.
The Big Heat
- Friday, June 21 6:30 PM
Fritz Lang
United States, 1953
Digital Restoration

A noir masterpiece, and not a pretty picture, as cop Glenn Ford prowls the underworld for his wife’s killers. Gloria Grahame delivers a memorable performance as the girlfriend of brutal gangster Lee Marvin.

Fritz Lang’s America

June 21–August 11, 2019

Leaving Nazi Germany for Hollywood in 1935, Fritz Lang left behind the epic superproductions of his Weimar-era career (featured at BAMPFA last winter) but brought the angst and shadows of German Expressionism with him to California, where, along with other European emigres, he helped to hone what was later dubbed film noir. This series consists of films both made and set in the United States; here, Lang replaced the cosmopolitan crime syndicates, science fiction, and mytho-historical subject matter of his German films with stories of thwarted aspiration and frustrated desire played out in suffocating small towns and alienating urban environments that reflected the psycho-sociopolitical landscape of contemporary America. His first American film, Fury, was an aptly titled expression of anger at homegrown vigilante injustice, and for the next twenty years he explored the psychological fallout of systemic inequality, corruption, and crime. Lang’s flawed protagonists are all but helpless in the face of social forces that have created them, and despite whatever resistance they muster, they are ultimately compelled to meet their fates. But still they try to defy the limitations that society dictates: from Sylvia Sidney’s determined ex-con in You and Me to Edward G. Robinson’s bank teller and aspiring painter in Scarlet Street to Gloria Grahame’s gangland survivor in The Big Heat, Lang’s American films are full of unforgettable characters whose interior struggles are as palpable as the material ones they face in life.

Kate MacKay, Associate Film Curator

Less

Buy tickets for this series

Thanks to Chris Chouinard, Park Circus; Kristie Nakamura, Warner Bros. Classics; David Jennings, Sony Pictures Entertainment; Daniel Bish, George Eastman Museum; Mark Balsam, Shout Factory; Lynanne Schweighofer, Library of Congress; Jason Jackowski, NBC Universal; Mark McElhatten, Sikelia Productions; Dana Hillyer, Swank Motion Pictures; and Mark Johnson, Harvard Film Archive.