Fritz on Fridays: The Westerns of Fritz Lang with Garrett Strpko

On the first Friday of every month, this column by critic Joshua Polanski will feature a short review or essay on a film directed by Fritz Lang (1890-1976), the great Austrian “Master of Darkness.” Occasionally (but not too occasionally), Fritz on Fridays will also feature interviews and conversations with relevant critics, scholars and filmmakers about Lang’s influence and filmography. As a special installment of Fritz on Fridays, this interview is being published mid-month.

For most cinephiles, the name Fritz Lang doesn’t conjure up images of the American Wild West and gunslingers. Lang’s name and legacy as the “Master of Darkness” are much more likely to recall film noir genre tropes or specific canonical titles like Metropolis than a picture about Frank James or Union-Confederate skirmishes. While the genre may be something of an anomaly in Lang’s six-decade-spanning filmography, the deserts of the American West end up being just another scenic sandbox for the key themes and artistic trademarks of the great stylist. Lang has a long and complicated infatuation with grand metanarrative myths, and the United States has no more lingering or potent national myth than the Western.

Lang’s first two Westerns — The Return of Frank James (1939) and Western Union (1940) — came back to back and very early in his Hollywood career, a reasonable signal of an artist wrestling with the stories a country tells about itself to make sense of his new home. The first, a sequel to Henry King’s Jesse James and starring Henry Fonda, is the most explicitly mythic as it finds loose inspiration in the historical outlaw Frank James, the brother of Jesse James, and uses one of the most iconic American movie stars to do so. Western Union changes the subject from a real-life outlaw to the arrival of the telegraph line to the Great Plains region and it might be Lang’s most genre-typical Western.

Strangely for Westerns, Lang seldom includes Indigenous Americans, and they are almost entirely confined to Western Union apart from what is essentially a cameo in Rancho Notorious (1952). Lang’s third Western, Rancho is also the only one of any critical significance and not without reason. It’s a marvelous revenge film about a man seeking a catharsis of retribution for his fiancée’s murder by some outlaws. It might even be one of the most visually pleasing American films.

For this column’s first interview, I sit down with Garrett Hartman Strpko, a Ph.D. student in Communication Arts (Film) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a special interest in the intersection of film and philosophy, to talk about all three films. From the similarities between film noir and the Western genres to the song-based narrative structure of Rancho Notorious to the ideological use of violence in The Return of Frank James, our conversation tries to think through some of the biggest hurdles and exciting insights into Lang as a filmmaker of the quintessentially American genre.

The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Garrett Hartman Strpko is a Ph.D. student in Communication Arts (Film) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His primary areas of interest lie in film and media theory, history and philosophy, ranging from film phenomenology to post-war American cinema and video game studies. His research currently focuses on how presentations of history in different media situate the spectator’s relationship with the past.

Joshua Polanski: Maybe a good place to start is your relationship with Fritz Lang and his films.

Garrett Hartman Strpko: I started watching Fritz Lang films about a year or two ago. One of my academic interests is violence in cinema, especially war cinema. I watch a lot of films that have to do with World War II and Nazism and espionage and that kind of thing. Fritz Lang is the king of that type of thing in the 1940s.

JP: Sometime later, I’d be interested to get your opinion on American Guerrilla in the Philippines. It’s an interesting film in part because most cinephiles probably have no idea that Lang made a film set in the Philippines during World War II. He himself didn’t like it very much.

Anyway, I thought of you for this conversation because of your academic background as it relates to the Western and violence onscreen. What are your academic interests and how do they affect how you approach these three films?

GHS: I’m a film and media studies scholar first and foremost. When I started my Ph.D., there was a question of whether I wanted to do philosophy or film and media, and I settled on the latter, but I take philosophical approaches in my work. I focus on a school of thought known as phenomenology, which is interested in questions of human experience and the sorts of structures that uphold human experience. One of the areas of inquiry I’m currently interested in has to do with how films appeal to our sense of belonging to a historical past.

We know that films use certain techniques to create their visions of the past. It’s one thing to ask what sort of techniques these films use to show the past, what the screenplay does, what is the story being told here, and what are the ideological implications of that. I go a step beyond that by asking questions like how some of these stylistic choices perhaps appeal to or affect our understanding that this is a representation of our shared historical past.

Think of films like Saving Private Ryan and the many that have followed, whether they’re war films or other historical films, that use muted color palettes or desaturated color to create a sense of pastness; it appeals to our knowledge of the past and to our understanding of what historical photographs and films look like. It creates a sense of atmosphere that’s just as much about the horrors of war as it’s about this sort of thing that happened in history that we all integrate into our day-to-day lives. We understand in a really implicit and very much a background kind of way that we belong to a nation that has this historical past or belong to a people that has this historical past and that these are constantly – in very small, minimal, but irremovable ways – operative in our day-to-day.

JP: Do you think that would entail being more interested in maybe the aesthetic than the trope of the past? When you see a Western, are you more interested in how things are being presented visually or sonically rather than explicitly pointing to something like Fritz Lang’s racist depictions of Indigenous peoples?

GHS: I think it’s both. I tend to pay most attention to aesthetics but not exclusively. Different questions appear at different times and require different kinds of tools to analyze them right. I am very interested currently in aesthetic choices and I’m weary that there’s very much a trend in a certain kind of academic criticism to simply look at tropes at the expense of aesthetics.

Continue reading at the Midwest Film Journal.