Second World War Noir

As the film begins, the main character, played by Ray Milland, is sitting alone in a dark room, watching the hands of a clock slowly move toward the point where he can be released from the mental asylum where he has spent the last two years. When another man does come in to tell him that the desired time has come, he urges him to stay away from the cities for a while, to remain in small towns like the one where the institution is located. Milland’s character, Stephen Neale, differs with his former keeper, however stating that after a long period of enforced peacefulness he’d like to get back to the energy and noise of London.
Something of the spell cast by Fritz Lang's 1944 film MINISTRY OF FEAR comes from the fact that Neale never quite manages to reach his stated goal of metropolitan hustle-and-bustle, which no doubt would have been of the kind that could be so lovingly depicted by Hollywood in the 1930s and ‘40s. Though he manages to reach London by train, surviving a bombing run by the Luftwaffe squadrons then besieging England, the city appears almost marginally less deserted than the little village and the asylum from which he’s come. The darkly lighted Hollywood soundstages used to represent London here do irretrievably close this thriller off from any kind of convincing portrayal of Blitz-era London, as does Neale's unaccountable eagerness to return to the beleaguered city, but the air of unreality gives this World War II espionage thriller an intriguingly dreamlike, uniquely noirish atmosphere.
It came as the third of four such anti-Nazi thrillers directed by Lang, which began with MAN HUNT (1941), scripted by John Ford collaborator Dudley Nichols, and HANGMEN ALSO DIE!, co-written by Bertolt Brecht, and concluded with the Gary Cooper-starring CLOAK AND DAGGER (1946). As anyone who’s seen Lang’s appearance in Godard’s CONTEMPT (1963) might remember, the Austrian-born, one-time Berlin-based filmmaker liked to portray his experiences with the Third Reich as something of an espionage thriller in its own right. In 1933, or so the director said, soon after his THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE had been banned in Germany, Goebbels presented him with a Faustian pact of complete control over the German film industry, in return for unstinting loyalty to Hitler, to which Lang responded by fleeing for Paris by train that night. An oft-told story that’s been questioned by some, including Lang biographer Patrick McMilligan (“The Nature of the Beast,” 1997), it’s at the very least of interest in how it corresponds with the movies Lang made once he was safely ensconced in Hollywood, movies with the cumulative effect of taunting the men who nearly became his masters.

The source material for MINISTRY OF FEAR came from a novel by Graham Greene, the third of his to be adapted for the screen, after ORIENT EXPRESS (in 1934) and THIS GUN FOR HIRE (in 1941, from “This Gun for Sale”). Film might have seemed like a natural fit for the novelist, who admitted to picking up cinematic techniques for his thrillers, which he termed “entertainments,” and had also drawn attention, both good and bad, to himself as a film critic with his willfully provocative opinions, including attacks on Hitchcock’s directorial skills and the claim that Shirley Temple, at nine years old, represented a sex symbol to some in her audience- that last assertion sparked litigation. That same cynical view on life was hard for cautious film producers to digest, however, as with MINISTRY’s producer, Seton I. Miller, who also adapted Greene’s novel, written just the year before. Despite the author’s interest in the medium, he found Miller’s adaptation to be altogether too movie-like for his tastes, marking an early low point for the author in the long arc of his direct involvement with the film world. Of course, his three collaborations with Carol Reed, including THE FALLEN IDOL (1948), OUR MAN IN HAVANA (1959), and one of the best movies of all time, THE THIRD MAN (1949), later helped to make for this. Lang felt disappointed by his own film, and is even said to have apologized to Greene for it when they later met, claiming that the studio, Paramount, had tied his hands.
Certainly, the movie is more frivolous in its depiction of the war than some of Lang's other movies on the same subject. Anyone looking for a serious depiction of wartime England would be better off with the Michael Powell and Emertic Pressburger drama THE SMALL BACK ROOM (1949). That being said, MINISTRY's lack of political weight isn't completely inapt, given the hero’s isolation from the unfolding conflict. As he enters a newly war-torn world, he's as disoriented as Elliot Gould's Philip Marlowe at the beginning of THE LONG GOODBYE (1973), awakening from a dream into a seedy downtown Los Angeles. Though MINISTRY begins with its hero leaving a mental asylum, the world outside seems as fragmented and irrational as his own interior landscape. Greene’s story, perhaps partly inspired by the thrillers he’d seen as a critic, traps Neale in an intentionally unlikely, even ridiculous network of intrigue. As he waits to catch a train back to London, the hero catches sight of a fair across the road from the station, being given by a charity organization of middle-aged women calling themselves “The Mothers of the Free Nations.” Ushered into a “psychic’s” tent, Neale is told by the turban-wearing, middle-aged woman within how to guess on the weight of a cake being given as a prize. As he leaves the fair, the cake clutched under his arm, to catch his train, a car pulls up and everyone’s favorite 1940s movie villain, Dan Duryea, gets out. In fact, the cake had been earmarked for his character, whom Milland’s hero had been mistaken for. So Greene’s entertainment is set in motion, with the Mothers of the Free Nations in pursuit of Ray Milland, all on account of one of the most absurd McGuffins ever concocted.
The fact that the movie’s main plot device can be designated by this famous Hitchcock coinage might indicate one reason why Greene and Lang were unhappy with its final results. Just as Greene had not been a supporter of Hitchcock during the director's earlier English phase, so Lang sometimes hinted at a sense of jealousy toward Hitchcock's Hollywood career, which may have resembled what Lang had initially envisioned for himself while settling into his American exile. As Neale investigates the Mothers and, later, goes on the run from the police for his suspected involvement in the Duryea character’s murder, it’s hard not to think of Hitchcock’s many wrongly pursued heroes, from Robert Donat in THE 39 STEPS (1935) to Cary Grant in NORTH BY NORTHWEST.

The heroine chosen to accompany Neale during his odyssey provides one clue as to why Lang remained a neophyte at these kinds of man-on-the-run films next to Hitchcock. Attempting to understand the roots of his persecution, Milland’s hero goes to the London headquarters of the charity organization, which he finds being run by a brother and sister (Carol Esmond and Marjorie Reynolds) who, like Lang, are Viennese refugees from Hitler. At least at first, they seem happy to help Neale in his investigation, bringing him to a seance being held at the home of the Mothers’ wealthy benefactress, where he encounters Duryea again. As the story progresses, Neale inevitably uncovers cracks in the facade of their apparent trustworthiness, but until that point the movie tries to divert us with the inevitable development of romantic feelings between Reynolds’ and Milland’s characters.
Hitchcock was always happy to stress sexual tension over intrigue in his espionage thrillers. By contrast, for this project Lang seems to have unenthusiastically accepted the studio-mandated romantic subplot and casting of Marjorie Reynolds as a matter of commercial calculation, taking his marching orders as acquiescently as Justin Theroux in MULHOLLAND DR. Next to the gallery of indelible heroines, as played by actresses ranging from Madeleine Carroll to Eva Marie Saint, who accompanied Hitchcock's heroes in their escape from the law, the radiantly blond, pretty Reynolds makes little impression in the movie, and in her subsequent career which the studio, Paramount, apparently hoped for from her. Her inoffensive character is also a poor fit with the very dark storyline as it was originally created by Greene, and her presence leads Miller’s script to one of the more ludicrously happy Hollywood-concocted endings you could ever hope to see. Lang directs the scene as though determined to move it off the screen as quickly as possible.
It’s all the more inappropriate because the adaptation does not remove the book's main revelation, which consists of the main character's reason for having been in that insane asylum in the first place. It does temper the severity of that reason, and largely ignores Greene’s original point of contrasting an individual’s understandable, even sympathetic but nonetheless criminal impulses with the impersonal carnage of large-scale warfare. Milland’s inherently dapper, self-assured nature, which here seems born to a tailored suit, also acts against the credibility of his character having spent the last two years in a mental asylum.

All the same, MINISTRY hands its star a harder task than portraying someone, as Humphrey Bogart did in CASABLANCA, with a merely checkered past, easily forgotten and forgiven by virtue of joining the fight against Nazi aggression. Neale is closer to the antiheroes of full-blown film noir, like Tom Neal’s Al Roberts in Edgar G. Ulmer’s Poverty Row classic DETOUR (1945), or to Henry Fonda’s Eddie Taylor in Lang’s own, pre-war crime film YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE (1937), singled out by a combination of fate and their own dark natures. For this reason, as well as for Henry Sharp’s superbly set-bound cinematography, MINISTRY OF FEAR feels more of a piece with movies made before or after World War II, or at least outside its narrative context, in presenting a main character who cannot fully share in the unanimity of wartime effort. Noir sometimes presents characters who had shared in that effort, as with Burt Lancaster in CRISS CROSS (1949) or Robert Ryan in ACT OF VIOLENCE (1948), but nonetheless wind up outside of society, looking in. If MINISTRY’s studio and producers felt obligated, with Lang’s passive assent, to insist on a more optimistic conclusion for their hero, the movie’s initial atmosphere of a dream, and its suggestion that Neale, like Sam Lowry in BRAZIL, has never really left the confines of his own mind, undercuts that saccharine ending.
The echoes of other films present in MINISTRY OF FEAR stretch back in time as well as forward. Even if Lang made the film without much confidence in the material’s quality, as he later claimed in interviews, there are scenes and images in the film that suggest the director returning to his earlier heyday in Germany making thrillers like DR. MABUSE, THE GAMBLER (1922), SPIES (1927), and THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE (1932). When Neale attends a seance sponsored by the Mothers of the Free Nations, for instance, it's hard to imagine Lang wasn't thinking of the similar scenes in DR. MABUSE, THE GAMBLER. Where the earlier German films have been retrospectively interpreted as looking forward to or commenting on the country's eventual descent into darkness, this later effort might be looking at that comparatively innocent, carefree era in onscreen images of intrigue.
For the product of a novelist who had lived through the Blitz and a director who’d escaped from Hitler, MINISTRY OF FEAR certainly feels rather cut off from any immediate experience of World War II. That being said, the movie does deserve better than it's gotten, such as the condemnation of the people who made it, or the film's present unavailability on Region 1 DVD. By most estimations a minor work, whether considered as a Graham Greene adaptation, a Fritz Lang film, or a World War II film, MINISTRY is still worthwhile as an example of all three, and as an entry in an otherwise uninvented genre: Second World War noir.