Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

#28 in my ranking of Fritz Lang's filmography. Courtroom dramas have limited appeal to me. They largely feel fake with artificial drama that would never actually happen in the setting. Sometimes a film can get past that, as in Fury, and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt actually ends up getting close. The drama isn't supposed to…

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Human Desire

#8 in my ranking of Fritz Lang's filmography. I'm going to come to Human Desire's defense. The second cinematic adaptation of Emile Zola's La Bete Humaine (the first was by Jean Renoir, another very good film in its own right), is a noir that Fritz Lang imbued with his wonderful visual style, but he never…

The Blue Gardenia

#27 in my ranking of Fritz Lang's filmography. There's something about this film that doesn't quite connect. This tale of murder, fear, and guilt seems to have all the right pieces, but by the end they don't really come together the way that they should. The focus on the female protagonist feels incomplete, like it…

Scarlet Street

#6 in my ranking of Fritz Lang's filmography. Another film marked as the beginning of the film noir genre, it actually feels more like a straight drama for most of the film. That really gives the film a solid character-based foundation on which its final act operates, creating a very well-fleshed out central protagonist who…

The Woman in the Window

#11 in my ranking of Fritz Lang's filmography. I'd say that this is the point where Fritz Lang was firmly planting his feet in the film noir genre. Made in the same year as Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity, it's a formational film to the genre, using shadows extensively, as Lang had been doing since his…