Looking for a Path: Fritz Lang and CLASH BY NIGHT

27 Looking for a Path FS Fritz Lang and Clash by Night O O Joe McElhaney PR Bending U N C O R R EC TE D Clash by Night (1952) has received little attention in the voluminous literature on Fritz Lang and it is easy to understand why: It is not a film that readily lends itself to the various methods by which Lang’s work has been explicated. The nature of some of these methods I will address throughout this essay. But my ambition is neither to make a claim for Clash by Night as fully and richly representative of this director’s work, on par with M (1931) or Scarlet Street (1945), nor to even further consign the film to the category of minor Lang – if indeed such a category exists. When Lang died in 1976, Wim Wenders wrote a short piece memorializing the director. “What do I know about Fritz Lang?” Wenders asks. “One sentence spoken by Barbara Stanwyck in Clash by Night (1952). ‘Home is where you get when you run out of places’” (104). Wenders (or his translator) slightly misquotes this line of dialogue. What Stanwyck utters early in the film is, “Home is where you come when you run out of places.” Nevertheless, it is of some interest to my purposes that Wenders chose a line out of this “minor” film with which to identify his own essential understanding of Lang’s work. The subtitle of Wenders’s essay is “The German Director Fritz Lang.” Throughout his piece, Wenders is preoccupied with the question of Lang’s status as a German subject. This has less to do with any desire on Wenders’s part to firmly locate a national essentialism than it has to do with the melancholic search for something that Wenders knows very well cannot be found: a German cultural imaginary strongly tied to the cinema and here incarnated in Lang. Such a search is central to the auteurist/cinephile strain of New German Cinema, particularly via Wenders and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The recognition of the work of a German director of the pre-Nazi period that is also tied to Hollywood and to exile (Douglas Sirk for Fassbinder, A Companion to Fritz Lang, First Edition. Edited by Joe McElhaney. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 0002178526.indd 514 7/31/2014 12:47:02 PM Looking for a Path 515 U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O FS Lang for Wenders) is key to this ambivalent fascination with German cinema’s history. The physical and metaphysical wandering that dominates so many of Wenders’s films (including those made outside of Germany) becomes a clear manifestation of this search for not simply a postwar German identity but also one mediated through cultural forms, in particular the cinema. This is clearest in Kings of the Road (released the year of Lang’s death), where the image and the myth of Lang also figures, via stills of Lang from Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 film Le Mépris (itself a work of mourning for classical cinema) and discussions of Lang’s silent epic Die Nibelungen (1924). But as Wenders notes, the Germany of his generation seems to have no place for Lang and is unable to fully recognize Lang’s achievement. Even Wenders himself initially has difficulty in understanding Lang’s films, which he sees for the first time in Paris rather than Germany. The films seemed so German to Wenders that “they couldn’t get through” to him, not these “cool, sharp, and analytical images” (103). Wenders does not note this but Lang was, in fact, Austrian by birth and did not become a German citizen until 1922. Sixteen years later, he took out American citizenship papers (McGilligan 88, 183). At the time he was making Clash by Night, Lang was still several years away from his unhappy return to Germany in order to make The Tiger of Eschnapur (1959), The Indian Tomb (1959), and The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960). Lang came back to the United States after this and remained in Los Angeles until his death. Clash by Night is significant in relation to all of this as it is, in its story situation, a film about home, about returning to one’s origins. But as Stanwyck’s dialogue indicates, home in this film is not so much a refuge, a source of comfort, as it is a site of despair, a place where you “come when you run out of places.” Such an ambivalence about the definition and experience of home is central to many German and Eastern European refugees during the postwar period, where the option of returning to Europe, the space of catastrophe that was once home, rarely involved a simple putting-into-action. For many refugee filmmakers, the question now facing them is whether Hollywood and America are where they belong, in particular a postwar Hollywood facing significantly increased economic downsizing and an American political climate in which “witch hunts” made many of them especially vulnerable on account of their leftist and politically progressive histories. (Lang himself claimed to have been briefly blacklisted after Clash by Night.) But the ambivalence about home during this period is not entirely unique to European refugees, nor is it even necessarily born in the cinema with the postwar moment. In fact, the title of this essay takes its cue from a line of dialogue from an early film of Lang’s, The Wandering Shadow (1920), a melodrama that has some interesting parallels with Clash by Night. “I am looking for a path that leads away from misery,” explains the heroine of that film in a dialogue intertitle, a cry of anguish that would undoubtedly resonate with many figures of exile. In what follows here, I would like to trace out several different paths by which one may arrive at an understanding of the implications of home in Clash by Night, a film that is both atypical for Lang and deeply revealing. 0002178526.indd 515 7/31/2014 12:47:02 PM 516 Joe McElhaney U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O FS Lang himself gave no indication, years after the film was released, that Clash by Night was anything but a project to which he was fully committed: “I’m very happy with the way [the film] turned out” (Higham and Greenberg 118). Such enthusiasm is not at all usual for him and he could often be dismissive of some of his more interesting films. His happiness with Clash by Night is at least partly traceable to the fact that he was hired to direct material that would appear to be so uncongenial to his own interests. Countering the skepticism of the film’s producer, Jerry Wald,1 that a European would be able to understand the American nature of the material, Lang claims that he responded with, ‘“Look, Jerry, either one is a director or one is not a director’” (Bogdanovich 82). This comment suggests that Lang understood his control over Clash by Night would be paradoxical, entailing a loss in terms of the European (or, more specifically, Germanic) style with which he first came to Hollywood’s attention, and which largely dominated his American films up to this point (hence Wald’s anxiety about hiring him). These previous American Langs, on the whole, operate within the realm of crime fictions, political thrillers, or the Gothic, allowing for Lang to demonstrate his mastery of light and shadow and his elliptical and poetic conception of time and space, all of this tied to a vision of the world marked by varying degrees of skepticism and fatalism. But directing Clash by Night would also involve a gain of sorts, allowing Lang to demonstrate a widening mastery of commercial film production, to be a director in the fullest, Hollywood sense of the term: not necessarily someone who worked anonymously on assignments, and thereby became lost as an artist within the studio system, but someone who was able to transform a wide range of projects, bringing them into line with his own larger concerns. Sirk has spoken of this method of working in Hollywood as one in which you will “bend your material to your style and your purpose. A director is really a story-bender” (Halliday 97). The seemingly uncongenial source material in need of “bending” here is a play by Clifford Odets that opened on Broadway in 1941 and ran for only forty-nine performances. “I liked the play,” Lang said. “I liked Odets” (Bogdanovich 80). The play’s failure at the time of its original production can at least partly be ascribed to bad timing. Clash by Night was, like most of Odets’s plays up to this point, very much a product of Depression America. But it opened three weeks after the attacks on Pearl Harbor, giving Odets’s ongoing concern for characters who, as he put it in relation to his first full-length play, Awake and Sing! (1935), “struggle for life amidst petty conditions” (37), a distinct sense of irrelevance for a country newly at war. The play’s occasional references to the situation in Europe (as though America had not entered the war itself ) and to the characterization of the anti-Semitic Uncle Vince as someone committed to the America First movement also immediately put the play into an historical limbo. Moreover, the play was staged just after the dispersion of the Group Theatre. Odets, as well as Clash by Night’s stage director, Lee Strasberg, and one of its featured actors, Lee J. Cobb, had been central members of this group and this also imparted to the production the status of a work that marked the end of something rather than its height. While Odets had been in Hollywood 0002178526.indd 516 7/31/2014 12:47:02 PM Looking for a Path 517 U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O FS off and on since the mid-thirties (arriving there at roughly the same time as Lang) and would continue to write and occasionally direct films until his death in 1963, he would make no contributions to the film version of Clash by Night.2 (Ironically, Odets would serve as a “friendly witness” before the House Un-American Activities Committee in May of 1952, just weeks before Clash by Night opened.) The adaptation was instead assigned to Alfred Hayes, an English-born novelist and poet as well as screenwriter. According to Lang, Wald greatly admired Odets’s play and it was Wald who was the driving force behind the project, as he would be two years later on his second and final collaboration with Lang, Human Desire (1954), also written by Hayes. Wald, Lang, and Hayes worked in harmony on Clash by Night, all of them strongly committed to the project. (For Lang, the harmony of the film’s production must have been a substantial relief after the fireworks that took place on the set of Rancho Notorious, released earlier the same year.) Odets’s play was not only “opened up” in the conventional manner of most films adapted from theatrical source material, it was also revised. The setting was changed (at Wald’s request) from Staten Island in the play to a fishing village in northern California. The carpenter Jerry Wilenski (played by Cobb on stage) becomes the sardine fisherman Jerry D’Amato (Paul Douglas) in the film. The sense of widespread unemployment dominating the play is replaced by a more general focus on a working-class community tied to the fishing industry, and with day-to-day anxieties over money absent. The anxieties of the characters in the film are mainly existential in nature, whereas in Odets they clearly have an economic origin. Wald’s requested change from a borough of New York City, passively surrounded by water, to a community that not only looks out to the Pacific Ocean but in which this ocean defines the community itself, will have a significant influence on the form the film will eventually assume. Even while the adaptation attempts to remain true to the spirit of Odets (including using a fair amount of his dialogue, although often with its original context altered), the changes in the source material are not minor.3 The time frame of the film is far more expansive than the play: The play occurs over a few weeks in a single summer in contrast to the film, whose story situation most likely covers two years. The play opens with Mae married to Jerry for seven years, their daughter Gloria having recently been born, in contrast to the film, which opens with Mae (Stanwyck) returning to her home town after an absence of ten years, single, and barely remembering Jerry, whom she will marry later. Joe (played by Keith Andes in the film) is not Mae’s brother in the play but is instead the truck-driving boyfriend of Peggy, a longtime neighbor and friend of Jerry’s.4 Earl (Robert Ryan in the film) is a motion-picture projectionist in the play as he is in the film. But for much of the play he is unable to find work doing this and instead operates as a freelance carpenter. And Peggy herself is reconceived for the film, from the melancholic and religious substitute teacher she is in the Odets original to the feisty young woman on the assembly line, played by Marilyn Monroe. All of these changes significantly alter the implications of the project. 0002178526.indd 517 7/31/2014 12:47:02 PM 518 Joe McElhaney R R EC TE D PR O O FS By opening the film with Mae’s reluctant return to her home town, rather than showing her as already married to Jerry, Clash by Night becomes a narrative of exile and return (even though the exile in this instance is self-imposed). Such narratives were quite common during the postwar period, in which a tension between home and travel, settling down (and along with this, home ownership) and wandering was central. This is succinctly articulated early in Clash by Night, when Peggy expresses a desire to see the country in a trailer, while Joe reminds her that this will be impossible if she is married to him and has children. Wartime recovery and rebuilding often made for an urgent pretext for these kinds of narratives.5 In Human Desire, for example, the male protagonist is a returning Korean War veteran. Clash by Night, on the other hand, refers neither to World War II nor to the Korean War then unfolding. Joe, at one point, makes a playful passing reference to the Third Division, as though he fought in it. But that is as far as the film goes in grounding its world in an immediate historical reality. But the interest of the film’s conception of home is not simply a matter of story situation and character. It is also related to larger formal issues at stake in the film and Lang’s relationship to these. Throughout much of the film, the words “house” and “home” are frequently used, house having clear connotations in terms of architectural space and home in terms of a space of the imaginary. I want to open up these terms here so that house and home can also, depending on the context, apply to America and American culture. But they can also apply to Hollywood, and to the cinema as a whole. Two statements from other filmmakers are of relevance to this: Fassbinder’s frequently cited reference to his own body of work being likened by him to a house, in which some of his films are the cellar, others the walls, still others the windows, “but I hope in the end it will be a house” (Elsaesser 263). The other is Godard’s statement that “the cinema is also a place, a territory . . . without history” (Daney 160). C O Abstracting U N The film’s change in setting from Staten Island to the northern California coast places the film within a certain American literary tradition, in particular through its evocation of the work of John Steinbeck. Lang was very much aware of this connection, specifically the film’s ties to Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (1945). In his consigning of Clash by Night to minor status, Michel Mourlet argues that Lang’s mise-en-scène here remains “at ground level” and “becomes bogged down in little psychological ruts dug by the script” (14). Mourlet implies that the film suffers from an over-reliance on literary and theatrical conventions, allowing these to carry the bulk of the film’s meaning. Lang himself has discussed how in Clash by Night, for the first time in his career, he rehearsed his actors for certain important sequences in the manner of a theatrical production (Bogdanovich 81). This 0002178526.indd 518 7/31/2014 12:47:02 PM Looking for a Path 519 U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O FS self-conscious, “serious” theatrical and literary dimension is rare in Lang. The vast majority of his films up to this point had involved the elevation of pulp material to the status of the mythical and iconic. In Clash by Night, Lang essentially accepts the film’s ties to literature and theater, to the world of Odets and Steinbeck, even while not necessarily and completely embracing them. Whatever their substantial differences, Odets and Steinbeck are very selfconsciously American writers, the first drawing upon a very strong New York working-class, immigrant Jewish sensibility, the language of its bruised and defensive characters filled with vernacular metaphors; the second, his language equally metaphoric, but with the work strongly tied to the gentile small-town and rural American West and Northwest, its characters far less verbal and articulate. For Lang, Clash by Night involves an immersing of himself in a contemporary American sensibility and setting, one with few (if any) ties to his work in Germany. Lang, the American citizen of 1952, can look upon and film the country he now calls home with a directness that had previously eluded or been denied him, even though this involves him pushing his style in new directions that run the risk of erasing his own distinction as a filmmaker. Lang’s intervention in Clash by Night is both visible and slightly masked, embedded within the dramatic material he is (very skillfully) filming rather than preceding it. Upon visiting Monterey for the purposes of research on the film, Lang claims to have seen a community that had changed from what he had read in Steinbeck (Bogdanovich 82). But Lang was misreading Steinbeck if he ever expected that world to have truly existed geographically and socially. In Cannery Row, Steinbeck creates an overflowing, interconnected, and ecological environment, at times utopic in its implications, and one that is effectively outside of time. “The people, places, and events in this book are, of course, fictions and fabrications,” Steinbeck writes on the book’s facing page, a claim that asks to be taken both literally and ironically, reality being given a poetic reimagining. Nevertheless, a tendency to abstract the real is scarcely alien to Lang’s sensibility. Where Clash by Night engages in a deviation from much of Lang’s cinema prior to this is its great investment in reproducing details of an everyday existence, reinforced in the film by its location shooting. This was not Lang’s first extensive use of location. There is a good deal of location work as early as The Wandering Shadow, which loosely anticipates Clash by Night in its triangular melodrama and its theme of exile in relation to its female protagonist. In Hollywood, Lang had shot on location as recently as American Guerrilla in the Philippines (1950) and both of his westerns for Twentieth CenturyFox, The Return of Frank James (1940) and Western Union (1941), contain location work. But the genres to which these films belong, and the conventions of outdoor shooting that come with them, neutralize the auteurist element of surprise in seeing a filmmaker work against expectations. Clash by Night, in contrast, shows a more extended and imaginative commitment to its setting than these earlier films. And yet the tendency towards abstraction is still in place. The setting, for example, while recognizable as Monterey, is not relentlessly underlined in its specificity; nor 0002178526.indd 519 7/31/2014 12:47:02 PM 520 Joe McElhaney U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O FS is the time period in which the film is set (most likely contemporary) clearly identified. The possibilities for the film to be unproblematically placed within the tradition of the small-town melodrama are averted. For example, in Sirk’s All I Desire (1953), we again find Stanwyck playing a woman returning to the small town she had left many years earlier. But whereas Sirk creates a vivid but also typical melodramatic small town of gossip, petty jealousies, and destructive prejudices, Lang largely ignores this impulse. Typical of Lang, there is no real sense of community, positive or negative, in Clash by Night. (When the main characters are in social spaces, they barely interact with the townspeople.) Lang is drawing upon certain realistic and naturalistic traditions but also deviates from them in order to create a world that is close to myth and outside of a concrete historical time and reality. The combination of location work and studio sets is, for the most part, quite seamless and the sets have an unusual degree of verisimilitude for Lang. At the same time, Lang’s methods of framing and staging action, camera movement, and cutting are quite complex, even though at first glance the film might suggest that Lang is more beholden here than normal to a transparent Hollywood style. The more one watches the film, the more uneasy one can become in observing these spaces: the concern with triangular framings so that the actors often seem to be backed into corners; surprising 180-degree cuts in the midst of otherwise fluid eyeline match continuity; and camera movements that are neither fully tied to the dramatic action nor fully outside of it but are engaged in a complicated, implicit form of commentary upon that action. One general tendency of the film is for space to be mapped out in a criss-crossing or zig-zagging fashion, either through camera movement, movement of the actors within the frame, or both. Jerry’s second-floor apartment is designed so that it has a seemingly infinite number of doors (some of them almost hidden), with the kitchen as a large central space (rather like a stage set). This requires the actors to constantly cross left and right, backwards and forwards in diagonal movements, much of this never allowing us to get a clear sense of the actual size of the space itself, which can seem alternately big or small, depending on the context. When Mae returns to the house she grew up in, a tracking shot takes us along a cement wall as Mae walks along this wall up to the entrance, where a small flight of stairs is angled to the left. Mae (and the camera) pauses at the foot of the stairs and then she begins to ascend. As she does so, the camera cranes up and to the left, following her as she reaches another, longer flight of stairs that leads directly to the porch. The camera ceases its craning as she reaches the porch, puts her suitcase down, and rings the bell. When no one responds to her ringing, she walks to her left to look in a window, as the camera pans with her and then pans following her back, as she squats down to lift up the mat in front of the door, looking for a possible key. As she looks off in frustration, and we hear the sound of a whistle, there is a cut to a long shot of the canning factory. Another cut takes us to a closer shot of Peggy emerging from the factory, eating a candy bar, as Joe joins her and they have a conversation in an extended, diagonal tracking shot across the street, 0002178526.indd 520 7/31/2014 12:47:02 PM Looking for a Path 521 TE D PR O O FS culminating with them engaging in a playful tussle. Then a surprising interruption to this occurs, as Mae’s voice is heard offscreen saying, “Aren’t you going to welcome me home, Joe?” Joe and Peggy look to their right as the camera rapidly pans left, following their gaze, showing Mae in a low-angle long shot, standing on the far left of the porch. The strongest element of surprise has to do with the close proximity of home to factory. The initial cut from Mae on the porch to the long shot of the factory would lead us to believe that this factory, while undoubtedly somewhere in the town (or on its outskirts), could be blocks or even miles away. But the Doyle house is, in fact, next door to the factory. This handling of space and movement is utterly typical of Lang, including the impulse towards initial deception in terms of distance and proximity. Where it acquires special interest here is twofold: Its rhetorical function in the way it insists upon the spaces of work and of home being virtually synonymous, as though the grinding nature of manual labor is inescapable, a trap, of which the looming architectural space of the factory over the small house serves as a constant reminder; and the proximity of the two seemingly disparate spaces being clearly a “found” location rather than a set, a reality that is then mobilized by Lang for expressive purposes. Those expressive purposes have to do with initially appearing to take the film’s realistic, detailed mise-en-scène at face value only to then insidiously destabilize it. EC Allegorizing U N C O R R The first few moments of Clash by Night show Lang returning to the idea of a montage sequence setting the stage for the film to follow, a device he famously made use of in Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922) and Spies (1928). During his American period, this approach was largely avoided, with the important and highly eccentric exception of You and Me (1938), in which the montage showing images of capital and labor, production and consumption is placed outside of the diegesis. The function of You and Me’s montage is almost entirely didactic, complete with a Kurt Weill/Sam Coslow song to accompany it, “Song of the Cash Register,” all of this evoking Weill’s left-wing collaborations with Bertolt Brecht in Germany in the twenties and early thirties. The opening to Clash by Night is more evocative of the first chapter of Cannery Row, with that novel’s description of sardine fishermen pulling their boats into the harbor, the whistles of factories blowing, of workers coming down to the Row in order to clean and pack the fish: “The canneries rumble and rattle and squeak until the last fish is cleaned and cut and cooked and canned and then the whistles scream again and the dripping, smelly, tired Wops and Chinamen and Polaks, men and women, struggle and droop their ways up the hill into the town and Cannery Row becomes itself again – quiet and magical” (Steinbeck 6). 0002178526.indd 521 7/31/2014 12:47:02 PM 522 Joe McElhaney U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O FS We have, then, a transposition of literary language into cinematic form, in contrast to a more abstract conception of montage in Lang’s earlier films, where the images give the impression of having no autonomy outside of their immediate function in the film and of being entirely constructed for their use value in the editing room. Lotte Eisner has written of Lang’s “desire for verisimilitude” (104) in Clash by Night, and Lang himself described this opening as a “real documentary about fishing boats, the mechanics about the canneries, and so on” (Bogdanovich 83). No doubt this investment in verisimilitude and documentary impulses would have been a welcome change for Lang after the heavy, baroque qualities of two Gothic melodramas made prior to this, Secret Beyond the Door (1947), a critical and financial failure in which he had total control, and the low-budget House by the River (1950). Both of those more fully conform to what might be the convention of a Fritz Lang film. With Clash, Lang is able to literally step out into a distinctly American open air, into daylight, to put behind him the world of shadowed interiors. However, we should not be misled into thinking that this opening does little more than show a concern with the phenomenological details of the workers in a fishing community. On one level, the cross-cutting between fish, seals, and sea gulls with the fishermen and factory workers implies a harmony between land and sea, human and animal, as though observing a natural evolution at work. One may also be reminded here less of the opening of Dr. Mabuse or Spies, with their insistence on a rigorous causality, than of the city symphony film of the twenties (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City from 1927 stands as one of its pinnacle achievements, made by Walther Ruttmann, who was responsible for the animated “Dream of the Falcon” sequence for Lang’s Die Nibelungen) in which the fascination with process, tied to a cyclical conception of time, is central.6 In Clash by Night, the process we observe involves the early-morning catching of fish by (among others) two of the film’s principal characters, Jerry and Joe, on a fishing fleet to its final destination in a local factory where the fish are sorted by a group of female workers (among them, Peggy) and put into cans several hours later. In comparison with the opening of You and Me, this is a fairly “objective” collection of shots, with none of the insistent meaning of the earlier film. Nevertheless, the fluidity of the connections Lang makes from one shot to another only slightly veils the rhetorical function of this sequence. The words “Directed by Fritz Lang” at the end of the credits appear over images of crashing waves that eventually subside and roll out to sea, as though linking the auteur with these images of a violent natural world that subsides into calm. Throughout the literature on Lang, the tendency to read his films in terms of creative allegory is overriding. Raymond Bellour’s argument that “Lang alone, in a sense, incarnates the notion of mise en scène quite so decisively or abstractly” (27) and in which cinema becomes “the ultimate metaphor” (28) stands as archetypal in this regard. The placement of Lang’s name in the credits of Clash by Night points to his demiurge-like presence over the film, still the ultimate master of controlling 0002178526.indd 522 7/31/2014 12:47:02 PM Looking for a Path 523 U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O FS chaos and shaping it into aesthetic form, even while now assuming the more conventional role of the “story-bender.” Indeed the opening even implies a connection to the Book of Genesis, as we move from the sea to the fish to the land and to animals before man is shown, followed by woman, a potentially Edenic world (a tie again to Steinbeck) immediately negated by images of a culture devoted to labor, the explicit Biblical allegorizing of Metropolis (1927) turned inside out. If, as Bellour notes, Lang’s American films, in comparison with his German ones, offer a “more pragmatic view” (28) of the cinema’s capacity to offer a vision of the world, and in which vision itself is foregrounded, then this opening from Clash by Night (a film never mentioned by Bellour) serves as a major example of Lang’s pragmatism, produced under the circumstances of the Hollywood studio system. “When you make films for Big Business,” Lang said once, “you rarely do exactly what you want” (Grant 94). Water, then, may be seen as yet another trope through which Lang’s relentless search for the “ultimate metaphor” of the cinema is enacted. As Carlos Losilla has noted elsewhere in this volume, water is “one of the great rhetorical devices of Lang’s cinema.” What Losilla sees in Lang’s constant return to this device is a resistance to the “fluidity of classical cinema” in favor of something far more “turbulent.” By applying Losilla’s reading to Clash by Night, the images under and immediately following the credits may be seen as a metaphor for Lang’s own relationship to this project, as the images move from turbulence to fluidity, albeit a fluidity that is more apparent than real. The character of Earl is one that most clearly invites an allegorical reading, in particular given the changes to the character from Odets to Lang. Even before we see him, his identity is bound up with the cinema, if in a largely ironic fashion as when Jerry proudly tells Mae (who has yet to meet Earl) that Earl is “in the movie business.” Bellour argues that in the American Langs there is a recurring presence of a character “who sees and seizes appearances within the rectangular frame of his camera” (28). In Odets, Earl’s appearance in the projection booth occurs only in the play’s final scene, which culminates with a deranged Jerry murdering him, as Mae and the other principal characters are locked outside. In the film’s equivalent of this moment (which is not the film’s final sequence), Jerry and Earl fight but Mae is present at the event and Jerry accidentally pushing her against one of the projectors causes him to stop attacking Earl, who survives to the end of the film. For Odets, the cinema (and popular culture under capitalism as a whole) creates an image of a false paradise of romantic love and economic security available to all. Joe is given a long, didactic speech to that effect, delivered to Peggy in the penultimate scene of the play. (The film gives him a much simpler, somewhat moralistic speech about marital commitment.) In Odets’s stage directions, the projection booth is described as a “veritable picture of some minor hell!” (226). In a quite heavy ironic gesture, as Jerry murders the man who projects the cinema for a living, the soundtrack to a romantic film can be heard. In the Lang, something more nuanced occurs. Our first view of Earl is in the projection booth where he is changing and rewinding reels of film and he speaks of his desire to cut up the 0002178526.indd 523 7/31/2014 12:47:02 PM 524 Joe McElhaney U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O FS “celluloid angel” who is starring in the film he is projecting. When Jerry boasts to Mae, “Earl knows some of the movie stars in person,” Earl responds by pointing at a reel he is rewinding and says, “Handle ’em all day.” In Odets, Earl likewise speaks of a desire to cut up women but this occurs early in the play and is unrelated to the cinema. The shift from a generalized attraction to violence against women in the play (although delivered tongue in cheek) to the image of cutting up a woman on celluloid shifts the film over to the level of cinematic metaphor. Earl projects moving images but he is also linked with cutting (that is to say, to a displaced form of editing) and with the tactile, handling actors all day, like a metteur en scène. Before one takes this reading too far, though, it is important to stress that Earl’s relationship to this tradition of American Lang protagonists is quite incomplete and marked by frustration more than anything else. Earl Pfeiffer fails at living up to the status of a full-bodied metaphor. He does not seize and possess images but merely projects the images of others, over which he exerts no control or manipulation. He can neither cut nor touch. He gives shape to nothing. A concern throughout much of Lang’s cinema with the human becoming the site of a negation, identity erased, or, conversely, with identity becoming little more than the sum of a series of disguises and imitations is, in Clash by Night, given a somewhat different articulation. When Mae dismisses Earl as a “kind of an imitation,” we are not in the world of master criminals and their disguises nor in the erasure of personality brought about by the forces of modern audio-visual technology in so many other Lang films. Instead, these concerns are transposed to those of the psychological melodrama, a tradition to which the film uneasily belongs. In a shot of Earl somewhat later, drinking a beer alone on the deck of a restaurant that looks out at the ocean, Lang frames him off-center right. A zig-zagging fence cuts across the bottom of the frame while to his left is a telescope and above his head to the right, painted on the facade of the restaurant, is a large octopus, its tentacles spread out as though about to devour him. When Mae soon joins him, Lang uses a reverse angle as the octopus disappears and we see out to the ocean. But the telescope remains in the shot, at the far left, as though linking these two unsatisfied, wandering characters with the desire to look at some unspecified beyond, perpetually out of literal reach, like the cinema. Lang explained that when he first arrived in Hollywood, shooting Fury (1936) for MGM, he was discouraged from using symbols in the film. “‘Fritz, American people don’t like symbols,’ Lang claimed a studio executive informed him.” Lang sees his own reliance on symbols as a German cultural heritage (“In Germany, we worked with symbols.”) that does not translate very well into American cinema and culture (Bogdanovich 28). But such a precise distinction between a symbolic German cinema for Lang and a transparent Hollywood one is not borne out by the example of Lang’s American films, nor does such a distinction hold in terms of American cinema as a whole. Patrick McGilligan dismisses the sequence in Clash by Night of an unhappily married and sexually unfulfilled Mae looking out at the crashing waves of the ocean as an “old chestnut” in its reliance on 0002178526.indd 524 7/31/2014 12:47:02 PM 525 D PR O O FS Looking for a Path U N C O R R EC TE Figure 27.1 Clash by Night (1952), Fritz Lang, RKO Radio Pictures, Wald/Krasna Productions. Figure 27.2 Clash by Night (1952), Fritz Lang, RKO Radio Pictures, Wald/Krasna Productions. 0002178526.indd 525 7/31/2014 12:47:03 PM 526 Joe McElhaney U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O FS “metaphor for Mae’s inner turbulence” (395). But as with the opening montage, such moments place the film within a tradition of the naturalist melodrama, in which the bodies and psychological states of the protagonists are frequently linked with the world of nature, as well as with machinery, and in which the human is a type of animal. Several of Lang’s films prior to this make use of certain of these naturalist elements, in particular Fury, Scarlet Street, and House by the River; and in Human Desire, an adaptation of Émile Zola’s La Bête humaine (as well as, more deliberately, a remake of Jean Renoir’s 1938 film version), Lang, Hayes, and Wald will pursue this even further. The dialogue of Clash by Night is often quite explicit in terms of its own naturalist inclinations, already present in the Odets play but extended in the film. “What kind of an animal am I?,” Mae asks Jerry on one of their early dates, in lines written by Hayes. “Do I have fangs, do I purr? What jungle am I from?” And when Jerry eventually discovers the adulterous affair that is taking place between Mae and Earl, he runs out of the house screaming, “Animals! Animals!” A decade prior to Clash by Night, Wald produced a great example of this genre, Manpower (1941), directed by Raoul Walsh. Wald’s enthusiasm for Clash by Night should not be surprising in that Manpower anticipates the later film, not only in its remarkably similar triangular situation but also in its naturalist sensibility.7 Water and rain are also central in the Walsh in which the exhausted working-class bodies of the film are equated with machines and electrical wires, electricity substituting for blood as it courses through the veins of the film’s electrical workers, even while the wires themselves acquire biological implications, “treacherous as a snake,” as one character puts it. At the end of the opening montage of Clash by Night, we hear a train whistle over a shot of the canned sardines sliding into place on a conveyer, followed by a straight cut to the train pulling away as Mae is finally revealed, in long shot, walking across a pier into the town, suitcase in hand. [Figures 27.3 and 27.4] Do the sound/image relations here suggest that Mae’s destiny is as sealed as the contents of these cans? For Lotte Eisner, Clash by Night shows that in Lang “it is no longer the symbolism of an independent, autonomous fate as in the early German films. Tragedy can be averted by an act of free will on the part of the protagonists” (320). I wonder, though, if the film offers anything so simple and if the relationship between the images of the canned sardines, sliding into their pre-determined spots on the assembly line, with Mae’s arrival does not offer itself to be read on at least four levels: The first of these corresponds to Eisner’s reading; the second is one in which Mae’s fate is now locked into place in the community from which she originally fled; a third, in which symbolic meaning is suspended in favor of an objective, documentary-like presentation of an environment, of which Mae’s arrival is one detail among many; and a fourth, unresolved one, in which a dialectic is established between fate and free will, between a closed world and an open one, between the cans in the factory and Mae surrounded by the open-air environment of the pier. 0002178526.indd 526 7/31/2014 12:47:03 PM 527 D PR O O FS Looking for a Path U N C O R R EC TE Figure 27.3 Clash by Night (1952), Fritz Lang, RKO Radio Pictures, Wald/Krasna Productions. Figure 27.4 Clash by Night (1952), Fritz Lang, RKO Radio Pictures, Wald/Krasna Productions. 0002178526.indd 527 7/31/2014 12:47:04 PM 528 Joe McElhaney Exhausting U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O FS If we situate the image of Mae crossing the pier strictly within the context of Lang’s body of work, we may be reminded of the allegorical character of Death in Lang’s first major film, Der müde Tod (1921), in which Death states, “I have traveled far and am weary.” The bridge in that much earlier film has enormous symbolic power, marking as it does the passage between life and death as well as the inexorability of fate. (Siegfried crossing the drawbridge in Die Nibelungen also draws upon this idea.) Mae inherits Death’s state of weariness brought on by perpetual travel. When Joe asks her why she has not returned home sooner, Mae responds, “Why didn’t I go to China? Some things you do, some things you don’t.” Extensive travel produces no significant experience, no real insight into the world. It only exhausts. But the weariness in Clash by Night is also biological, tied to aging, as much as it is existential or fatalistic. This is not Lang’s first venture into such territory. The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street focus on an aging male character (played by Edward G. Robinson in both films), reaching out to the possibility of his life changing as a result of an encounter with a younger woman, both situations leading to murder. But in Woman in the Window, the character is a college professor, already married with children, and in a more privileged economic position than Mae. Moreover, the dream structure of the film releases Wanley from his dilemma (the committing of a murder in self-defense and with suicide as Wanley’s only option out of it) as the film’s epilogue slides into comedy, an exit strategy denied to Mae. For Mae, Jerry’s attraction is largely pragmatic, “a place to rest.” At the same time, Mae’s situation is less desperate than that of the Sunday painter Chris Cross in Scarlet Street in that her desperation does not culminate in an impulsive, homicidal act nor does she ever undergo the psycho-sexual humiliation of Chris. (This, instead, is transferred over to Jerry.) Had the resolution to the film been more faithful to Odets, the implications of this would have clearly been different. The violence of Clash by Night is instead domestic and working class, evoking Lang’s adaptation of another play, Ferenc Molnar’s Liliom (1934), shot in France just prior to Lang’s departure for America. But unlike that earlier film, no true physical violence occurs between men and women, it is only discussed or, as in the scenes between Joe and Peggy, handled in a playful manner. When Jerry reaches a peak of hysteria in his denunciation of Mae and Earl over their affair, he raises his hands in frustration, like a child, fists clenched as though he is unable to actually commit the deed of punching or slapping either of them. Clash by Night is a film of half-finished gestures, a world so exhausted that it can no longer seize the world around it with any force, gestures sometimes mimicked in Lang’s own strategies. For example, Bellour points to the importance of objects in Lang serving as tokens around which the narrative is structured (33). In Clash by Night, the potential object in this regard is Mae’s cigarette lighter. In the play, Mae is a non-smoker but in the film she smokes frequently and she drops a cigarette into a cup of coffee 0002178526.indd 528 7/31/2014 12:47:04 PM Looking for a Path 529 U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O FS when she declares that “home is where you come when you run out of places.” Up until her marriage to Jerry, she holds on to a cigarette lighter that, we eventually discover, was given to her by a well-to-do (and now deceased) politician boyfriend. Stanwyck consistently uses the lighter in an expressive manner, pausing to look at it after she lights a cigarette, or tossing it in the air as she stands in front of a window and talks to Joe. Four years after Clash by Night, in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956), Lang will take another cigarette lighter and use it in a much more aggressive manner via insert shots and precisely within the tradition that Bellour describes. For Bellour, such a concern with the object has its roots in a German cultural tradition, in which the object takes on a symbolic life, putting into play a dialectic of human subject and inanimate object (33–34). But in Clash by Night, Lang never shows this lighter in close-up, never emphasizes its symbolic or talismanic potential. At such moments, Lang plays the game of a traditional metteur en scène, allowing middledistance framing and staging of action to carry meaning, and presuming that the spectator will notice details. After the marriage, the lighter disappears, as though its use value not simply for Mae but for the film has expired. In so many of Lang’s earlier films, the characters were caught up in a system close to mesmerism, external or self-induced, in matters not only of power and social success but also of love and sexual attraction, the last of these emerging with particular clarity in You Only Live Once (1937), The Woman in the Window, and Scarlet Street. By the time of Clash, this idea (like the characters of the film itself ) has run its course. Even the act of viewing has lost much of its power to enchant, destroy, or bear witness. Compare the sequence in Liliom, in which the title character (Charles Boyer), in Purgatory, is forced to watch projected filmed footage of his life on Earth and to thereby account for his violent and unethical behavior, to the sequence where Mae and Jerry go to the movies in Clash by Night. In contrast to the character of Liliom, Mae and Jerry look at projected moving images in a disinterested fashion, as a routine social exercise. Mae is conspicuously bored watching the film (a musical, of which we only hear the soundtrack – no reverse angle of the image is shown) and nudges Jerry to leave. “This is where we came in,” the archetypal statement of the spectator who goes to a film strictly for a routine cognitive mapping of the story and nothing else. Images in this world no longer have the power to seduce but are instead connected to the monotony of existence. (Even the lyrics we hear to the song refer to this sense of routine: “Once again / Tell me once again.”) While standing outside of the projection booth, immediately prior to meeting Earl, Mae lights a cigarette but is quickly told, by an employee, that she will have to put it out, presumably due to the flammable nature of the film that is just a few steps away from her. Clash by Night was released the year in which nitrate stock began to be replaced by acetate safety, the latter a stock far less susceptible to fire. The culminating act of terror in Lang’s final German film prior to leaving that country, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), is a fire in a chemical plant, launched by the insane Professor Baum, working under a type of hypnosis-beyond-the-grave engineered by the dead Mabuse. Mae’s potential for fire and destruction, though, 0002178526.indd 529 7/31/2014 12:47:04 PM 530 Joe McElhaney U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O FS is quickly averted and has its origins not in a visionary will to power but in boredom and indifference. “My time is not so precious,” Mae tells Jerry on one of their early dates. Time, space, and narrative are often firmly linked in an overt manner in Lang. But this linkage is also the sign of a perpetual frustration, of intellectual conceptions of time and space refusing to be shaped, and narrative collapsing into incoherence. The first image we are shown of Peggy (within the opening montage) is her waking up, turning on a light, and looking at her alarm clock. But we don’t see another clock until much later in the film, after Mae has married Jerry, and she is unable to sleep, a brief sequence that culminates with her looking out the window at the images of crashing waves. (A clock appears once more after this, in a clear symbolic idea taken from the play in which an anxious Jerry, now aware of his wife’s infidelity, is unable to stop an alarm clock from ringing.) One can see this minor role the timepiece assumes here as part of the film’s overall muting of Lang’s general tendency towards discursive strategies. But two alternate possibilities present themselves here. The two moments in the film have certain links with one another. In the first, a woman, Peggy, who believes that her future holds numerous possibilities, an optimism almost entirely bound up with her youth and her looks, reluctantly awakens to go to her job in a canning factory. In the second, a woman approaching middle age, Mae, is unable to sleep, her optimism about life now vanished and replaced by melancholia. The times on the two clocks are similar: Peggy’s reads 4:30, Mae’s just a few minutes before 4:00. Lang’s camera tracks across the room, starting with the alarm clock and Jerry asleep in bed, over to the empty spot of the bed where Mae should be, the camera slightly pausing on Gloria in her crib, before stopping on Mae looking out the window – a concise movement that lays out Mae’s limited options at this point in her life and the choices that she has made and with which she must now live. In the Odets play, Peggy, desperate to marry Joe, tells him that she is both happy and miserable. “Do you want my history in four words,” she asks him. “Great expectations, great disappointments.” In the film, Hayes and Lang give a variation on this dialogue to Mae, spoken again to Joe, and from their first extended sequence together, in the family home that has become Joe’s house: “What do you want, Joe, my life’s history? Here it is in four words: Big ideas, small results.” Are these two women opposites or deeply linked with one another? Do Peggy and Joe represent a new type of couple or are they doomed to enact the same destructive and violent arrangement of the culture around them, in which marriage (as Earl puts it) is spelled t-r-a-p. Lang’s structural and ethical relativism, seen across his body of work, is at play here once again, with the two clocks partly serving to link the two women. In the film’s first extended dialogue sequence, at the seafood restaurant Angelo’s, where Mae sees Jerry and his father, Papa D’Amato (Silvio Minciotti), the word “home” is used nine times, but only by the two men. For Papa, a widower, home is a space defined by the presence of a woman, resulting in his wanting to stay away from the male-dominated house he shares with his son and brother-in-law, Vince 0002178526.indd 530 7/31/2014 12:47:04 PM Looking for a Path 531 U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O FS ( J. Carrol Naish). Jerry, on the other hand, is immediately defined by his attachment to home and in this he will assume the female role, cleaning up after his father and uncle and even insisting, in a prim, wifely manner, that his uncle take down “them dirty pictures” of women that hang on the uncle’s bedroom wall. ( Joe, on the other hand, has turned the Doyle family home into something very masculine, its decor much more clearly signifying a world without women than that of the D’Amatos’.) In this early sequence at the restaurant, Jerry not only repeatedly insists that his drunken father go back to their house but it is Jerry who asks Mae the banal rhetorical question, “There ain’t nothin’ like home, is there?” prompting Mae’s world-weary response (as she stubs out her cigarette), “That’s what they say.” Jerry’s attachment to home is immediately established as being an extension of his uncomplicated and somewhat childlike nature. His simple domesticity is what will soon partly draw Mae to Jerry. But it will also become the source of Jerry’s extensive limitations for Mae, limitations that the film is never able to resolve. In spite of D’Amato’s insistence that a home is not really a home without a woman, a maternal figure at the center of it, the film resists this ideology. Mae appears to be competent enough as a wife and mother. But the manner in which she performs these duties gives no indication of a particular pleasure or satisfaction being derived from them. Consequently, the camera movement from Mae’s clock to the crashing waves suggests that the turbulence we witness is not only spatial and psychological: It is also temporal. Water becomes part of the larger system at work in the film of fatalistic forces, something beyond shaping, beyond control, a chaos that is a question of time as much as space. The underscoring over these crashing waves is a melody heard in the musical film that Mae and Earl see together: “Once again / Tell me once again.” Are we to believe that Mae is hearing this in her head as she looks at the water, the melody from a film with which she was conspicuously bored much earlier but which is now working its subliminal magic on her? Or is this an entirely rhetorical and ironic gesture on the film’s part, that even Mae’s exhaustion has (at least temporarily) exhausted itself ? Many of the agonies being articulated by both Mae and Earl have their basis in aging, in time running out for them, but, more pointedly, deal with the question of their own mortality. “I suppose that’s what everyone’s afraid of,” Jerry says to Mae earlier in the film, “gettin’ old and lonely.” Mae’s mournful and resigned response of “I suppose so” is underlined by Lang with a high-angle shot of her as she says this; while Earl later refers to himself as “dead and in my grave.” Returning It is not clear whose decision it was to change Jerry’s character from Polish American to Sicilian. But Hayes’s intervention on the project is one possibility. Hayes belonged to the US Army Special Services during World War II during which he developed a special tie to Italy. He was a central figure in initiating the 0002178526.indd 531 7/31/2014 12:47:04 PM 532 Joe McElhaney U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O FS project that later became Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà (1946) and he also made an uncredited contribution to Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948). Hayes’s novel, The Girl on the Via Flaminia (1949), later adapted by him into a play, uses the wartime occupation of Italy as its setting for a love story between an American GI and an Italian prostitute. (A 1953 film version, Act of Love, was directed by Anatole Litvak.) And his first important American writing credit is providing the story for Fred Zinnemann’s Teresa (1951), again using a war-ravaged Italy for part of its setting for a love story between an American GI and an Italian woman, but with the story now taking place immediately after the war. In relation to Clash by Night, though, Hayes’s professional ties with postwar Italian cinema suggest a later film of Rossellini’s for which Hayes made no contribution, Stromboli, terra di dio (1949), also a film about a woman in a small fishing community, isolated and trapped in an unhappy marriage of convenience to a fisherman. As in Lang’s film, water in Stromboli – and nature as a whole – become active structural and symbolic elements of the film and the heroine, Karin (Ingrid Bergman), must (like Mae) come to accept and adapt to this environment. But the resemblances between the films end there. Rossellini places his film in an immediate postwar historical reality: Karin is a Lithuanian refugee, initially living in an internment camp, who marries in order to get out of the camp; the marriage is, among other things, a stepping down in terms of her class origins, in contrast to Mae giving up on any possible hope for escaping from her class. (The contempt in which the other women on the island hold Karin brings Stromboli closer to the tradition of the small-town melodrama than Clash by Night.) At the same time, Stromboli shows a landscape in which the historical and ancient past exist side by side with the present day. The houses and other buildings that dot the landscape, while still in use, evoke states of ruin, while the volcano on the island itself, melodramatically erupting near the end of the film, implies a barely repressed ancient world that rises up of its own accord. In contrast to Lang, who opens his film with the catching and canning of fish but then otherwise weaves this spectacular gesture into the main body of the film, Rossellini makes this aquatic environment a continually active presence, culminating with the catching of the tuna, a tour de force of montage that Karin is forced to witness. In fact, Karin’s journey in the film is one not only of witnessing but ultimately of seeing the world around her in the most profound, metaphysical way, and with clear Christian and Roman Catholic implications. Her attempted escape from the island culminates with her journey to the top of the volcano, the majestic sight of what she finds from this mountaintop bringing about her profound sense of revelation about the mystery and beauty of the world. Deciding to return to her husband, she cries out to God for help as the film ends. Mae Doyle is denied such revelatory breakthroughs and the film ends with her deciding against running away with Earl. Instead, she tracks down Jerry on his boat (the site of his proposal to her) and implicitly asks to be forgiven. The last line of dialogue of the film belongs to Jerry and he says it to Mae: “Go take your child home.” The final image of the film is of a fishing boat on a bay, presumably Jerry’s boat and presumably taking Mae and the baby back to town. But the shot itself 0002178526.indd 532 7/31/2014 12:47:04 PM Looking for a Path 533 U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O FS evokes a line spoken in the play by Joe to Peggy that was not used in the film: “Marriage is not a convent. It’s not a harbor – it’s the open world, Peg. It’s being out at sea in a boat” (121). Eisner interprets Lang’s ending as one that emphasizes responsibility and “that it is not possible simply to run away from moral obligations” (317). Her reading takes its cue from Luc Moullet’s interpretation of this ending as offered in his book on Lang, published in French in 1963. But the conclusion of the film also hearkens back to The Warning Shadow and that film’s ethical debate over the nature of marriage itself: Does one have the right to live the life one chooses once one has formed a bond in marriage? The film ends with its married couple returning to live in the mountains, away from civilization, in order to pursue a “pure” love. Clash by Night, by contrast, reverses the implications of the end of The Warning Shadow in that Mae and Jerry return home in order to deal with the more mundane realities of marriage and day-to-day living. The last word spoken in the film is home, the last image of the film is one of calm waters, order restored. One could read this as an apparently happy ending, marking the beginning of a new way of understanding of existence for Mae. However, it could also be read as a defeat for her, a final withdrawal into a world of lowered expectations. At the end of Stromboli, Karin has become pregnant and a maternal instinct to protect her “innocent” unborn child manifests itself on the top of the volcano. She, too, decides not to run away from “moral obligations.” But the tone of the two films in this regard is very different. Within an immediate postwar context, Stromboli is the bolder of the two films. It is one in which the “evolution of the language of cinema” that so concerned André Bazin is clear, and this evolution for Bazin in the late forties and early fifties found its ideal incarnation in Rossellini and neorealism: a documentary-like cinema closer to a sketch than a painting, its narrative dominated by fragments and ellipses, and by the “image fact” in which objects, decor, and human beings never assume priority over each other. Clash by Night, in comparison, feels like the “smaller,” comparatively classical film, its director relying upon strategies that have their relationship to an earlier moment in the evolution of the language of cinema, the German silent and early sound filmmaking tradition from which Lang emerged, here tempered by its confrontation with Hollywood. But such an apparent opposition is, I think, rather facile. Bellour argues that in Lang “the film seems to be constructing itself as it goes along,” which Bellour likens to a “typical manifestation of mise en scène assured of its power, but invariably a little disheveled and wearied too” (36). Lang is less “free” in making this particular film than Rossellini was in making Stromboli, more constrained by the circumstances of production. In taking on the film, Lang likewise assumes a kind of responsibility, a moral obligation to be a certain kind of American and Hollywood filmmaker. But as I have attempted to argue throughout this essay, the classicism Lang is practicing here is of a highly distinctive order, in which his persistent relativism and associational thinking continue to strikingly manifest themselves in a film that is both old and new, inventive and exhausted. Clash by Night points to the ongoing paradoxical relationship between these elusive categories of modernist 0002178526.indd 533 7/31/2014 12:47:04 PM 534 Joe McElhaney and classical cinema, between a cinema that has its roots in a distinct national culture and a cinema that resists this, categories that are sometimes just a whisper away from one another, and in which a boat carrying a mother and child safely back to land can just as quickly turn into a ghost ship, drifting on the open sea. Harriet Parsons is credited as the film’s producer. But according to Patrick McGilligan, Wald, credited as executive producer, essentially assumed the function of producer on the film. Clash by Night was assembled by an independent company that had recently been formed by Wald and the writer/director Norman Krasna, Wald-Krasna Productions. The film was released through RKO Radio Pictures, the production crew comprised primarily of those under contract to RKO. Parsons “would supervise daily progress for Krasna and Wald” (390). Stanwyck starred in Rouben Mamoulian’s 1939 film version of Odets’s play Golden Boy (1937). As with Clash by Night, Odets did not participate in the adaptation, which makes a number of major changes to the source material. A 1957 television production of Clash by Night, directed by John Frankenheimer for Playhouse 90, was a condensed but essentially faithful version of the play. In this version, Kim Stanley played Mae, E. G. Marshall played Jerry, and Lloyd Bridges played Earl. Robert Ryan played the part of Joe in the original Broadway production. Mae was played by Tallulah Bankhead, Jerry by Lee J. Cobb, Earl by Joseph Schildkraut, and Peggy by Katherine Locke. See my essay “Laughter and Agony in Minnelli’s The Long, Long Trailer.” Bernard Eisenschitz (204) compares the opening of Clash by Night with the final sequence of another classic documentary, Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran (1934). The basic triangular narrative situation of Clash by Night, placed within a naturalistic environment, may be traced back at least as far as Sidney Howard’s 1924 play They Knew What They Wanted. There have been three film versions of the play: Rowland V. Lee’s The Secret Hour (1928), Victor Sjöström’s A Lady in Love (1930), and Garson Kanin’s They Knew What They Wanted. But the play’s influence may also be seen in such films as Howard Hawks’s Tiger Shark (1932), also set in a fishing community, and two films directed by Ray Enright, Slim (1937) and The Wagons Roll at Night (1940). In addition, a stage musical version of They Knew What They Wanted, Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella, opened on Broadway in 1956. 2 5 6 U N C O R R 7 EC 4 TE D 3 PR O O 1 FS Notes Works Cited Bellour, Raymond. “On Fritz Lang.” Trans. Tom Milne. Jenkins 26–37. Bogdanovich, Peter. Fritz Lang in America. New York: Praeger, 1967. Daney, Serge. “Godard Makes [H]istoires: Interview with Serge Daney.” Jean-Luc Godard: Son + Image. Eds. Raymond Bellour and Mary Lea Bandy. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992. 0002178526.indd 534 7/31/2014 12:47:04 PM Looking for a Path 535 U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O FS Eisenschitz, Bernard. Fritz Lang au travail. Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2011. Eisner, Lotte. Fritz Lang. London: Secker and Warburg, 1976. Elsaesser, Thomas. Fassbinder’s Germany: History, Identity, Subject. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 1996. Grant, Barry Keith, ed. Fritz Lang Interviews. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2003. Halliday, Jon. Sirk on Sirk. New York: Viking, 1972. Higham, Charles, and Joel Greenberg. “Interview with Fritz Lang.” Grant 101–126. Jenkins, Stephen, ed. Fritz Lang: The Image and the Look. London: BFI Publishing, 1981. McElhaney, Joe. “Laughter and Agony in Minnelli’s The Long, Long Trailer: Or, ‘Isn’t This Fun, Honey?’” The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film, Volume 3: 1946 to 1975. Eds. Cynthia Lucia, Roy Grundmann, and Art Simon. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012. 199– 219. McGilligan, Patrick. Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997. Mourlet, Michel. “Fritz Lang’s Trajectory.” Trans. Tom Milne. Jenkins 12–17. Odets, Clifford. Six Plays of Clifford Odets. New York: Grove, 1979. Steinbeck, John. Cannery Row (1945). New York: Penguin, 1992. Wenders, Wim. “Death is No Solution: The German Film Director Fritz Lang.” West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices. Ed. Eric Rentschler. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988. 101–104. 0002178526.indd 535 7/31/2014 12:47:04 PM