Focus Features

Fritz Lang
The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960)

Fritz Lang always insisted that he left Berlin on the last train before a giant swastika closed the border. The Viennese maverick departed his adopted city aware that he had some angered powerful people with his allegorical lampoon of the Nazi hierarchy in The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933), which had been co-scripted by his then-wife, Thea von Harbou, who had become a member of the National Socialist Party the previous year. It was ironic, therefore, that when Lang arrived in West Germany in 1958, he had similarly alienated his last remaining allies in the Hollywood studio system that had given him sanctuary and he was forced to throw himself on the mercy of exploitation producer, Artur Brauner.

Technically, Lang's first outing back in Europe was a remake of The Indian Tomb, which he had originally scripted with Von Harbou for director Joe May in 1921. But while its exotic setting chimes in with the prodigal theory, a clearer picture of Lang's attitude to the country that had made and then nearly destroyed him emerges in The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse.

Lang took his inspiration from an article about a Nazi scheme to install surveillance equipment throughout the luxurious Hotel Adlon in Berlin in order to spy on important guests. But while he strove to make an espionage thriller that equally castigated the American tycoon (Peter Van Eyck) seeking to acquire a British nuclear facility and the evil genius masquerading as a blind soothsayer (Wolfgang Preiss), Lang reserved his special ire for those ordinary Germans who had silently conspired in the tyranny of the Third Reich. Consequently, Dawn Addams's duped femme fatale meets the same fate as murderous sidekick Howard Vernon, while plodding lawmen Gert Fröbe and Werner Peters look on impotently.

The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse

Lang had fiercely resisted revisiting the chameleonic mastermind (“the bastard is dead and buried’). But, as Brauner averred that his only viable options were an updating of Metropolis (1926) or a musical version of Destiny (1921), Lang was left with little choice. Needing money and with Brauner already owning the rights to Norbert Jacques's source novels, Lang signed up to avoid re-experiencing the pain he had felt on being excluded from Joseph Losey's disappointing 1951 remake of M.

It was a decision Lang would come to regret, as the disrespect of senior cast and crew members reminded him of the reason why he had spent so long away from Germany. Moreover, he found that Berlin had changed so far beyond recognition that he was unable to provide the planned insight into the divided city's political and psychological mood. Trapped between memory and imagination, Lang produced a film whose insufficiency of realism exposed him to vengeful German critics, who delighted in pointing out how out of touch and outmoded he had become in exile. But the pace and panache of plot-driven action that was stuffed with eccentric characters, cool gadgets and lashings of sex and violence appealed to mainstream audiences and its box-office success persuaded Brauner to make a further six series entries. Indeed, at the age of 90, he still has plans to resurrect Mabuse one last time.

Lang, on the other hand, never directed again and he eked out his remaining 16 years revelling in his canonisation by the auteurs of the nouvelle vague, mythologizing his achievement at prestigious retrospectives and peddling projects that no one wanted to fund. However, the formula he concocted in his swan song was adopted by the James Bond franchise, while his depiction of a world threatened by international terrorism remains chillingly relevant half a century on.

Next: Luis Buñuel and Viridiana (1961)

READ MORE ▼

Fritz Lang
The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960)

Fritz Lang always insisted that he left Berlin on the last train before a giant swastika closed the border. The Viennese maverick departed his adopted city aware that he had some angered powerful people with his allegorical lampoon of the Nazi hierarchy in The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933), which had been co-scripted by his then-wife, Thea von Harbou, who had become a member of the National Socialist Party the previous year. It was ironic, therefore, that when Lang arrived in West Germany in 1958, he had similarly alienated his last remaining allies in the Hollywood studio system that had given him sanctuary and he was forced to throw himself on the mercy of exploitation producer, Artur Brauner.

Technically, Lang's first outing back in Europe was a remake of The Indian Tomb, which he had originally scripted with Von Harbou for director Joe May in 1921. But while its exotic setting chimes in with the prodigal theory, a clearer picture of Lang's attitude to the country that had made and then nearly destroyed him emerges in The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse.

Lang took his inspiration from an article about a Nazi scheme to install surveillance equipment throughout the luxurious Hotel Adlon in Berlin in order to spy on important guests. But while he strove to make an espionage thriller that equally castigated the American tycoon (Peter Van Eyck) seeking to acquire a British nuclear facility and the evil genius masquerading as a blind soothsayer (Wolfgang Preiss), Lang reserved his special ire for those ordinary Germans who had silently conspired in the tyranny of the Third Reich. Consequently, Dawn Addams's duped femme fatale meets the same fate as murderous sidekick Howard Vernon, while plodding lawmen Gert Fröbe and Werner Peters look on impotently.

The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse

Lang had fiercely resisted revisiting the chameleonic mastermind (“the bastard is dead and buried’). But, as Brauner averred that his only viable options were an updating of Metropolis (1926) or a musical version of Destiny (1921), Lang was left with little choice. Needing money and with Brauner already owning the rights to Norbert Jacques's source novels, Lang signed up to avoid re-experiencing the pain he had felt on being excluded from Joseph Losey's disappointing 1951 remake of M.

It was a decision Lang would come to regret, as the disrespect of senior cast and crew members reminded him of the reason why he had spent so long away from Germany. Moreover, he found that Berlin had changed so far beyond recognition that he was unable to provide the planned insight into the divided city's political and psychological mood. Trapped between memory and imagination, Lang produced a film whose insufficiency of realism exposed him to vengeful German critics, who delighted in pointing out how out of touch and outmoded he had become in exile. But the pace and panache of plot-driven action that was stuffed with eccentric characters, cool gadgets and lashings of sex and violence appealed to mainstream audiences and its box-office success persuaded Brauner to make a further six series entries. Indeed, at the age of 90, he still has plans to resurrect Mabuse one last time.

Lang, on the other hand, never directed again and he eked out his remaining 16 years revelling in his canonisation by the auteurs of the nouvelle vague, mythologizing his achievement at prestigious retrospectives and peddling projects that no one wanted to fund. However, the formula he concocted in his swan song was adopted by the James Bond franchise, while his depiction of a world threatened by international terrorism remains chillingly relevant half a century on.

Next: Luis Buñuel and Viridiana (1961)

Luis Buñuel

Luis Buñuel
Viridiana (1961)

Appalled by the outcome of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), Luis Buñuel had sought sanctuary in the United States. However, the desire to relaunch his directorial career had taken him to Mexico, where he became a citizen in 1949. Consequently, there was dismay amongst his devotees when it was announced that he was returning to his native Spain to make Viridiana. It appeared as though Buñuel had been seduced by dictator Francisco Franco and there was much mockery of the fearless Surrealist when he submitted his screenplay to the authorities and accepted all their changes, including the wholesale revision of the ending.

However, the decision to have Silvia Pinal's anti-heroine play cards in a ménage with cousin Francisco Rabal and maid Margarita Lozano rather than enter his bedroom hardly took the curse off this scathingly denunciation of all levels of Spanish society. Indeed, Buñuel could not have made his intentions any plainer.

Pinal's unworldly novice is sent to visit uncle Fernando Rey because her grasping mother superior wants him to keep donating largesse to her convent and this disdain for all things clerical and aristocratic courses through the action. But Buñuel is no more enamoured of the common people, as he shows them mercilessly abusing Pinal's charity when she inherits part of Rey's estate after he commits suicide in remorse for attempting to drug and rape her while she's wearing the wedding dress in which his wife died. Played out to Handel's Messiah, the parody of Leonardo Da Vinci's Last Supper presents ordinary Spaniards as paupers, criminals and dangerous lunatics. Yet by having Pinal abjure her vows and try to make a difference in the secular world rather than live in cloistered seclusion from the masses, Buñuel betrays a deeply felt sense of morality. It may owe more to spirituality than religion and to humanism than Catholicism, but it nevertheless suggests that sinners should not be damned for their failings and holds out a hope, however vague, for a better future.

Viridiana

Viewed in this light, Buñuel's homecoming was an act of solidarity with filmmakers like Juan Antonio Bardem and Luis García Berlanga (Bienvenido Mr Marshall, 1953) and Carlos Saura (Los Golfos, 1960), who were making subversive features under El Caudillo's nose. Moreover, by flattering the censors into thinking they were the guardians of free speech, Buñuel was able to finish the picture in Madrid unmolested, ironically alongside Nicholas Ray's biopic of Christ, King of Kings.

His political triumph was completed more by chance, however, as Viridiana was mistakenly screened at Cannes as Spain's official entry at the 1961 festival and when it tied for the Palme d'or with Henri Colpi's Une Aussi Longue Absence, Under-Secretary of Cinema José Muñoz-Fontan bounded up to the stage to accept the award. It was only after the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano dubbed it a “sacreligious and blasphemous” travesty that the real meaning of this savage satire became apparent and Franco not only suppressed it, but also replaced Muñoz-Fontan with the aptly named Jesus Sueros.

Buñuel had nursed since childhood a fantasy about drugging a beautiful woman resembling Spain's English-born queen, Victoria Eugenia, and ravishing her as she lay helpless before him. Despite the victim's transition into a nun who then seeks to atone for her faults by ministering to the undeserving poor, Buñuel always insisted that he didn't deliberately set out to offend Spanish sensibilities. “To tell the truth,” he sneered about Franco's reaction to this insult to his nation, “after all he had seen, the film must have seemed very innocent.”

Next: Alfred Hitchcock and Frenzy (1972)

Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock
Frenzy (1972)

Alfred Hitchcock's Hollywood exile was inspired by a purely commercial decision. Lured across the Atlantic by producer David O. Selznick in 1939, Hitchcock had quickly begun making films about the growing threat of fascism in order to wean the United States off the Isolationism that he felt was now jeopardising world peace and he returned to Europe during the Second World War to rally French resistance with the shorts Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache (both 1944). However, the studio system afforded Hitch the intellectual, technical and dramatic expertise he required for his pictures and convenience rather than any sense of homesickness had been his primary motive for making Under Capricorn (1949) and Stage Fright (1950) back in Blighty.

By the early 1970s, however, it was considerably cheaper to make a movie in Britain than it was in California. Thus, following the box-office disappointments of Marnie (1964), Torn Curtain (1966) and Topaz (1969), Universal was keen to cut costs by having Hitch shoot Frenzy as a runaway. But the front office was also relieved to avoid a Stateside setting for this realist adaptation of Arthur La Bern's novel, Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Squire, as the source crimes of 1940s mutilator Neville Heath were so brutal that they would risk exposing a darker side of the American psyche at a time when the nation's self-esteem was at a low ebb. Convincing Hitchcock that he would have greater latitude away from the lot to pursue his interest in Michelangelo Antonioni and the French New Wave, the studio packed him off to London for the first time since The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).

Frenzy

Hitchcock more than willing to go, however. His confidence had been badly dented by his recent failures and he clearly felt the need of some home patch adulation. Denied the services of Vladimir Nabokov, he hired Sleuth playwright Anthony Shaffer to tackle
‘the story of a man who is impotent and therefore expresses himself through murder.” Perhaps there was an element of revenge in making the killer a greengrocer like his disciplinarian father, as the murders of waitress Anna Massey and dating agency boss Barbara Leigh-Hunt are particularly pitiless. But Barry Foster's “Necktie Killer” has considerably more charm than Jon Finch, the ex-RAF pilot who becomes inspector Alec McCowan's chief suspect, and there's a hint of pity for his plight as he tries to recover a tie pin from Massey's rigor mortised hand in the back of a potato delivery truck.

Yet in returning to the Covent Garden fruit market he had visited so frequently with his father, Hitch must have been haunted once again by those childhood terrors that had informed so many of his films. Moreover, he was also afflicted by the prodigal's amalgam of nostalgia and dismay, as he discovered how much his birthplace had changed, and not necessarily for the better. Consequently, he rapidly lost enthusiasm for the project and, after learning that his wife and longtime collaborator Alma Reville had suffered a stroke, he increasingly took refuge in long lunches and afternoon naps and left assistant director Colin Brewer to supervise his meticulously planned set-ups.

Resentful at having to shoot nouveau landmarks like the Hilton Hotel and New Scotland Yard, Hitchcock compensated by adopting an antiquated argot that seemed as consoling as his recourse to such trusted techniques as Murnau's gliding camera movements and the abrupt dislocation of Soviet montage. Yet the 73 year-old also seemed to relish the opportunity to depict graphic scenes long denied him by the Production Code, as by reviving the shocking spirit of The Lodger (1926), he demonstrated that he was just as hip as the new breed of counterculture iconoclasts and movie brats who were beginning to dominate Hollywood.

Next: Ingmar Bergman and Fanny and Alexander (1982)

Ingmar Bergman

Ingmar Bergman
Fanny and Alexander (1982)

While editing the TV-movie Face to Face (1976), Ingmar Bergman was accused of tax evasion. He was bitterly hurt by his hounding by both the authorities and the press, especially as it was clear that he was not personally responsible for the irregularities. Feeling betrayed and deeply ashamed by his public humiliation, he came close to a nervous breakdown and decided to quit Sweden for West Germany.

Bergman's anger and disappointment coloured his first venture in exile, The Serpent's Egg (1977), which prompted director Kjell Grede to ask him why a man with such a passionate love of life made films that were so melancholic and fatalistic. So, while back on the Baltic island that had been his home for a decade to make Fårö-Dokument 79 (1979), Bergman began writing a screenplay that drew on his childhood as the son of the chaplain to the Swedish royal family and amounted to “a huge tapestry filled with masses of colour and people, houses and forests, mysterious haunts of caves and grottoes, secrets and night skies.” As he wrote in his journal: “By playing, I can overcome the anguish, loosen the tension, and triumph over destruction. I want at last to show the joy that I carry within me in spite of everything, joy that I have so seldom and so poorly given life to in my work. Being able to portray energy and drive, capability for living, kindness. That wouldn't be so bad for once.”

Fanny and Alexander

The opening segment revolves around a family Christmas in the opulent home of an Uppsala theatrical family in 1907. Ten year-old Alexander (Bertil Guve) and his younger sister Fanny (Pernilla Alwin) watch with fascination, if incomprehension as the grown-ups over-indulge in pleasures that are more carnal than Christian. But the festivities are curtailed by the death of the children's father and their lives take a further turn for the worse when mother Ewa Fröling marries martinet bishop Jan Malmsjö. Stifled by their stepfather's Lutheran austerity and hypocritical tyranny, the two siblings are rescued from virtual captivity by Jewish moneylender Erland Josephson, who, along with his puppet-making nephew, restores them to a world of magic and imagination within the safety of his antique shop.

With its obvious references to past and present traumas, Bergman clearly intended Fanny and Alexander to exorcise some ghosts. But he was also determined to wreak allegorical revenge on those who had driven him from home, while also confounding the critics who had declared him a spent force after From the Life of the Marionettes (1980). Yet even though he announced that this would be his last picture, Bergman found funding hard to come by, especially as he wished to make a five-hour television version of the story in addition to a 188-minute feature. Finnish friend Jörn Donner, who was head of the Swedish Film Institute, eventually brokered a co-production deal for the $6 million required for a period extravaganza with some 60 speaking parts and 1200 extras. It proved money well spent, as the film won four Academy Awards and restored Bergman's critical reputation. But he remained in Munich for another two years and when he finally returned to Swedish cinema, as a writer in 1992, he again sought refuge in family history in Bille August's Best Intentions and son Daniel Bergman's Sunday's Children.

Back to Prodigal Directors Come Home