The Precincts of Dream: Fritz Lang’s Ministry of Fear

| MH Rowe |

a circle of white people sitting around a round table with a dragon statue on it. The people are all dressed well and are holding hands.

The Ministry of Fear plays on glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, February 9th, through Tuesday, February 11th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.


The Hollywood thrillers that Fritz Lang made after leaving Nazi Germany—and after making there such classics as Metropolis (1927) and M (1931)—tend to be likable because they’re unmoved by the tyrannical demand that films ought to make complete sense. Though he’s somewhat like Hitchcock in stature and reputation, Lang’s tone is far less cool. His suspense is dreamier and more excitable, campier and more arthouse. If Hitchcock represents the consummate professional technician, Lang for all his technical skill is an aesthete of pulp. His films bristle with dreamscape flourishes right out of expressionist nightmares; he loves lurid explosions, mirrors, visions. In a movie directed by Lang, you always suspect that the main character only needs to wake up to fix all his problems—and in one of his nightmare films, that’s exactly what happens.

And so you have Lang’s Ministry of Fear (1944), adapted by Seton Miller from the Graham Greene novel of the same name and starring Ray Milland (harried and unflappable at the same time) and Marjorie Reynolds (game and funny throughout). Greene would later script Carol Reed’s classic noir The Third Man (1949), a film that perfectly balances aching romance, grief, and suspenseful mystery amid the ruins of postwar Vienna. The Ministry of Fear shuns this tasteful proportion. Where The Third Man is wry tragedy, Ministry tells a semi-preposterous story of Nazi intrigue during the Blitz. The first 20 minutes of the film alone establish Lang at his loony or demented best. 

Ray Milland waiting in his hospital room, with the shadow of the doctor on the wall

It begins with Stephen Neale (Milland) being released from an asylum where he’d been incarcerated for helping his sick wife end her own life. At the gate, his doctor soberly tells him, “Don’t get involved with the police again in any way.” This is exactly what they tell you when they clap you on the back at the beginning of a nightmare. At the train station, Milland wanders into a fair organized by a group called, rather mysteriously, Mothers of the Free Nations. Meanwhile blackout approaches; time to hide from the bombers overhead. The Nazis are coming. 

In short order, Milland receives inside information from a fortuneteller and uses the advice to win a cake, that confection symbolic of criminal secrecy (metal files, prison breaks). Here the cake implies something sexual, too, or at least tamely risqué—as if Ray’s marriageability as a single man has something to do with his apparent appreciation for the feminine arts of making sweet things. Every older woman at the fair seems to titter about it. Everyone goes quiet and snaps to attention, like the bystanders in a dream, when Milland correctly guesses the cake’s weight. Even an anonymous and well-dressed rival appears. The other man has come too late, however, and Milland dismisses his guess. 

Finally boarding the train, now with desert and blackout in full effect, Milland shares his car with a man the audience soon realizes is only pretending to be blind. Somewhere along the track, they must have crossed into dreamier precincts of reality. When the blind man accepts a piece of cake, he crumbles it apart with his fingers while Milland watches in slightly horrified bemusement. The train soon halts due to the nearby bombardment of a munitions factory, and it’s then that the fake blind man takes his chance. He breaks his stick over Milland’s head and absconds with the remaining cake. The scene that follows feels like it’s from an entirely different film—a war movie. 

Ray Milland and Marjorie Reynolds in light and shadow from desk lamp.

Dazed from the head trauma, Milland rushes downhill from the train car and into a blasted countryside filled with smoke, fog, maybe both. The blind man flees through the gathering obscurity to the ruins of an old barn or house. Stopping inside the wreck, he turns to shoot at Milland, who, in perfect movie logic, has decided he has to pursue that cake. As if the suddenly apocalyptic landscape was not enough to convey the atmosphere of dream, a series of dropped German bombs finish by spectacularly blowing up the ruined building in which the thief had been hiding. For a man who has been discharged from a mental institution and had his cake stolen, it’s certainly an extreme turn of events. Endless escalation. Milland has arrived at the opposite end of human culture from the clock-ticking calm of his hospital room. He’s become a refugee in his own life, perhaps a compelling metaphor for the pan-European disaster of World War II. At any rate, the personal has become political, meaning here demented and alluring, public and private.

From this auspicious beginning, Ministry of Fear settles into the slyly comic manner of “wrong man, wrong place, wrong time” suspense thrillers. Only it has that haze of unreality. When Milland tells Reynolds, “I wonder if you realize what it means to stand all alone on a dark corner knowing that somewhere one person is coming towards you to help,” you feel him wondering at a sense of mingled persecution and good luck. What’s more dreamlike than that? Of course, Reynolds’s character is named Carla Hilfe (in German, her last name means “help”), as if she had been conjured into existence by Milland’s need. War is for personal discovery, it seems. 

Ray Milland and Marjorie Reynolds sheltering behind a chimney

While the rest of the film perhaps can’t entirely match its climactic beginning, it all works in its stylish, daffy way. There’s a séance at which the other guests are just a little too tall or too pretentious or too otherworldly. There’s a murder, an accusation, a discombobulated private investigator. There are chase scenes, there’s sleeping in bomb shelters, there’s the revelation that Nazis really are afoot. There’s a shootout. It rains at a dramatically opportune moment. There’s even another surprising, implausible, and spectacular explosion. But surrealism never takes hold outright; Lang is too canny for that. The world of the film nevertheless might be nothing more than an extension of its protagonist’s delusions. Avoiding the police comes to seem, after all, like a method for not letting reality in. 

Anyway, a useful rule: Always trust a film that’s willing to begin with a climax, a set piece most films would hold in reserve for the second or third act. Maybe especially in the case of a film directed by Fritz Lang. His sense of violence often feels unusually shocking and spectacular for the golden age of Hollywood. Ministry of Fear is no exception.


Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon

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