Thursday, April 7, 2011

Making Hollywood Films Was Brutal, Even for Fritz Lang - NYTimes.com

“Cloak and Dagger” is one of a handful of anti-Nazi movies he [Lang] directed, which also include “Hangmen Also Die!” Released in 1943, that film turns on the assassination of Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich, a Nazi official who was gunned down in Prague in 1942. Its main point of interest, however, is that it was partly written by one Bert Brecht, as he’s charmingly called in the opening credits. According to Brecht’s journals, Lang broached the idea for the film while the two men were sunbathing on a Santa Monica beach.

It was a difficult, at times unintentionally near-comic collaboration, and Brecht grew disenchanted both with Hollywood and his collaborator, as was often the case with Lang’s colleagues, some of whom grew to hate him for his on-set cruelty. “What an infinitely dismal fabrication this hostage film is that I have to occupy myself with these days,” Brecht wrote in July 1942. “What a load of hackneyed situations, intrigues, false notes!” By October the situation was worse. (“I feel the disappointment and terror of the intellectual worker who sees the product of his labors snatched away and mutilated.”) But he kept at it and, while denied screenwriting credit, he did share the story credit with Lang."

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