1944 Directed by Fritz Lang
Stephen Neale is released into WWII England after two years in an asylum, but it doesn't seem so sane outside either. On his way back to London to rejoin civilization, he stumbles across a murderous spy ring and doesn't quite know to whom to turn.
Not even kidding, I won a cake just yesterday at a local fair and now I'm freaking the fuck out.
A moody, atmospheric, and a powerfully tense thriller that flows between the realms of paranoia and tangible disillusion. One of Lang's lesser efforts, mainly because of the ways in which it builds uneventfully, but Ministry of Fear is nothing less than riveting.
...And with a splash of expressionism in the flickering light.
Ministry Of Fear is a gem. It is a film about paranoia for paranoia's sake. It's about a labyrinthine underworld teeming with Nazis and swarming with ghosts. It's an exercise in Hitchcockian vocabulary spoken with a thick Langian dialect. It has the unfortunate honor of being a film by Fritz Lang that's not M, Metropolis, The Big Heat or Mabuse. What Ministry Of Fear is most known for is as a lesser Lang film. I find this entirely unfair. Ministry Of Fear is actually quite exceptional on its own merit. How Ministry Of Fear should be remembered is for its atmosphere of absolute dread and its inspired lighting of queer…
Fritz Lang's wartime thriller focuses on Stephen Neale upon his release from a two year stay in a mental asylum. Through chance, he is caught up in an odyssey involving a possible Nazi spy ring. Ministry of Fear really makes good use of its freewheeling plot in the first half of the film - it's far from typical stuff as we see fortune telling, a fight over a cake and a seance, among other set pieces. Broadly the film is somewhat generic, but Lang constantly lifts it with a psychological angle, which comes to fruition in the form of paranoia, brought on by constant fear and misdirection. The set design and lighting in particular are superb and there's numerous clever…
This is a Fritz Lang wartime film from 1944, tapping popular feelings of fear and paranoia that the Nazi menace could be anywhere–behind every door, even at the quaint village fete. Orson Welles worked some of the same territory in The Stranger in 1946, about Nazis hiding in a Connecticut village. So did Hitchcock in wartime films like Saboteur.
In this one, Lang creates a dispiriting world, a thoroughly uneasy setting, where identity and loyalty are always unclear, even as the bombs fall on England during the Blitz. Stephen Neale (Ray Milland) is the familiar innocent-man on the run. He is thrown into a conspiracy that he has to unravel to save his own name before it is too late.…
Shrouded in darkness, even when enshrined in all new light. Flooded with new revelations and still, all I can see is clouds, clouds, clouds. Have I just been cooped up for too long, or is everything really this much foggier on the outside. On second thoughts, could I have been blind to the real source of the shadows all along… You’ll not find a flashlight here.
Wartime anxieties wear an all-new shade of black-and-white in Fritz Lang’s world of comically large scissors and the most afraid you’ve ever been of a slice of cake. I can’t remember the last time I’ve gotten so paranoid over a piece of pastry, and yet here we are.
My internal flame was kept burning…
Noirvember #9
Cake noir!
Purely as a matter of personal taste I generally prefer American noir and I'm not usually a fan of anything to do with spies, but I still enjoyed this. Some great lighting, especially during the séance (the intimate lighting and the hushed whispering triggered my ASMR), and I loved all the gunshots flashing in the dark. Milland is on good form too. Nice "slice" of paranoia. (Just a shame it had to finish on that terrible cake gag, a bit like this review).
This Fritz Lang film reminded me some of Hitchcock, then on the analysis bit on the Criterion disc the guy spent considerable time comparing Lang to Hitch. So, I must have been on the right track there.
Ray Milland gets out of an asylum, and just wants to go to London, even though it's being bombed. While waiting for the train he attends a carnival type event sponsored by the "Mothers of Free Nations." He ends up winning a cake and on the train someone attacks him and steals his cake. This, of course, leads him into running for his life from a Nazi spy ring and from the police.
A good show, even though sometimes Milland did things that make you want to shout at the screen.
In look and movement this is the closest Lang's ex-pat movies came to looking like his German work, though here his mastery of the baffling, almost supernatural thriller is bent as much toward Kafkaesque comedy as paranoid tension. The cake is a lie.
doesn’t fully deliver and wraps up too quickly but develops a darkly nervous atmosphere. some great weird & tense moments — especially that séance.
This was all over a cake.
Fritz Lang's career became a lot spottier when he came to the states. His shorter, yet stronger output in Germany made him one of the best ever.
Ministry of Fear is a film that's not fully worthy of being known as one of the best in his filmography, but isn't without value. It has a nightmarish pace that feels uneven at times. This is really exemplified towards the end with a strong climatic and tense encounter is then wrapped up with a rushed almost laughable final scene.
