Criterion Collection: Ministry of Fear | Blu-ray Review

Fritz Lang aficionados can rejoice this month with Criterion’s release of his 1944 title, Ministry of Fear, the first time it sees a DVD transfer. Long regarded as a minor entry in Lang’s prestigious filmography, the last of a successive trio of anti-Nazi themed films from the German émigré is finally available for rediscovery. Though it may never escape its current status in the pantheon of its director’s legacy, it certainly stands out as an oddly constructed creature, a fussy war time noir whose sinister narrative is occluded by a stagnant paranoia that stirs the proceedings into a twisty nightmare.

Stephen Neale (Ray Milland) has just been released from Embridge Asylum in England while World War II rages on. He’s been put away for two years and insistently plans on traveling directly to London, even though it’s being bombed continuously. On the way there, he innocently stops at a village fair, a benefit run by the Mothers of the Free Nations. After guessing a cake’s weight in an innocuous contest, which begins the first of several references to his lack of a wife, he visits the fair’s psychic. Inadvertently, he says something to make her give him secret instructions to obtain that yummy cake, and he gamely plays along. But it’s immediately apparent that something ominous must be hiding in the cake, and Neale is followed onto the train by a suspicious looking blind man who creepily accepts a piece of the cake before wrenching it away and absconding from the train.

An air raid missile puts a stop to the faux blind man and motivates Neale to hire a PI to discover what the hell’s going on once he gets to London. He discovers that the benefit at the fair was a farce when he visits the Austrian brother and sister duo that run the Mothers of the Free Nations, Willi (Carl Esmond) and Carla (Marjorie Reynolds). And then he visits the woman that was purportedly the medium at the fair, one Mrs. Bellane (Hillary Brooke), but in place of a wrinkled matron he finds an ice cold blonde. Caught up in the séance going on at Mrs. Bellane’s, the murder of a guest member, Cost (Dan Duryea), quickly finds Neale on the run, with little time to confirm that he’s been cast into a pit of Nazi espionage, finding that their infiltration has a far and wide reach.

Based on a novel by Graham Greene, Ministry of Fear was reputedly a film that both author and director Lang considered to be an inferior piece of work. They both seemed to have a bone to pick with screenwriter Seton Miller, who significantly changed the proceedings and also diminished the obvious Nazi presence. Lang, due to the way the contracts were devised, was unable to combat Miller. The effect of this, however, results in a sickening tension as we’re never quite sure who is a Nazi and who is not. At the point where we get an actual direct reference, when Milland picks up a copy of The Psychoanalysis of Nazidom, written by the man that advises the Ministry of Home Security, the effect is chilling. Milland, who comes across like the older, more serious brother of James Stewart, is also suspect. It’s slowly revealed that his stint in the asylum came after being convicted of ‘mercy killing’ his terminal wife. And Lang keeps pointing us to the fact that looks are ultimately deceiving, revealing a sinister black capped shadowy man trailing Neale to be Scotland Yard. In a slow release romance with Austrian Carla (the Idahoan Reynolds alarmingly resembles Katherine Heigl), her obvious accent marks her as immediately suspect, but is she a Nazi? Flirtatiously, Milland tells her she “doesn’t look like one.” But two other characters are definitely endowed with the air of the Aryan. In the 40’s, before her associations with Abbott and Costello, Hillary Brooke was a go-to ice cold bitch, who churned out excellent supporting turns in fare like Anthony Mann’s Strange Impersonation (1946) and John Cromwell’s The Enchanted Cottage (1945), and one only wishes she had more screen time than the less effective Reynolds. And then there’s the ineffably ominous Dan Duryea, in a double role (and later used by Lang in two of his best features of that decade, both Joan Bennett vehicles), who gets to dial a rotary phone with gargantuan clown scissors. Never judge a book by its cover.

Disc Review:

Ministry of Fear has been long overdue for a DVD transfer, and it’s great to see that Criterion has taken up the cause. They’ve masterfully presented it here with a new 2K digital restoration, which is, needless to say, a much better way to experience it then those old VHS copies some may have floating around out there. The special features are slim, though this isn’t Lang’s first title in the collection. A 2012 interview from Lang scholar Joe McElhaney is enjoyable and informative, and the original trailer is also included.

Joel McElhaney
There’s a revealing amount of information from this 2012 interview with McElhaney, and it is most certainly of interest. Discussions of Lang’s problematic reputation in Hollywood during the 1940’s (he had been asked by Goebbels to take over the Nazi run film industry in Germany, which precipitated his flight) explain his trio of anti-Nazi films (Manhunt; Hangmen Also Die; Ministry of Fear) and the importance of their success and reception. McElhaney discusses the “lack of moral certainty” evident in Ministry, and how the film expertly utilizes some of Lang’s favorite motifs, such as circles and an obsession with time.

Final Thoughts:

While the séance sequence ultimately plays like a slapdash sequence from Clue, it is Lang’s artistry that really elevates Ministry of Fear from a meandering espionage noir. Henry Sharp’s cinematography expertly utilizes menacing shadows, though perhaps not to the extent that James Wong Howe does in Lang’s previous title, Hangmen Also Die. There’s a gorgeous aerial shot towards the finale, catching Neale and Carla from a glass paned rooftop, fleeing from the baddies who are also seen in hot pursuit from the same stairwell, rain pouring down on the outside and smearing the image into a nightmary blear. While Lang’s independently financed Hangmen, also an excellent feature, is set in the Czech Republic during Nazi Occupation, Ministry of Fear manages to be the more insidious and exploratory exercise. While Lang seemingly tries for a light note in its final frame, one should realize that he’s instead hinting at the toxic reverberations and sinister influence that trail beyond the frame (and beyond the war). Whereas Hangmen Also Die ends with the closing captions “Not the End”, the closing of Ministry, containing a joke about an innocuous object that played a detrimental part in the earlier proceedings, points to the fear and paranoia that remain and are retained in the mind, long after moments of abject terror dissipate.