“Mickey,” he will call out in her direction, “isn’t it true Harry Cohn nearly didn’t want me to direct The Big Heat because I showed up with glasses and he found me less authoritarian than when wearing my monocle?” Lily will confirm the story and sometimes add a punchline he has forgotten. Lang’s best audience and living encyclopedia when stories have to be authenticated or fleshed out with detail is Miss Latte, a former Berlin writer, with whom he has shared his life for the last 30 years. He will add sarcastic afterthoughts about the vicissitudes of film-making, conjure up examples from his vast storehouse of anecdotes, and gracefully floor you with cynical portraits of persons you thought would be sacred cows even to him. Ask him cold his opinion of Le Mépris and he will come up with a neat and lofty defence of Jean-Luc Godard’s integrity but put the same question to him some time later in a flow of pleasant after-dinner chatter and he will make a plea for creators’ right to failures. An untiring talker, Lang reacts as much as he acts and his answers are coloured by the context, the tone and repartie of a conversation. Georges Sadoul has written silly things about him, he says, but if historians misrepresent him, it is his own fault. “It’s a night for evil spirits and prayers of unloved maidens,” he smiles softly. Seeing me to the car after a long evening, he stops in the scented, semi-tropical night to look at a full moon. But high above the lights in Benedict Canyon, where the Beverly Hills slope into the Santa Monica Mountains, sits Lang, a Goethian figure of splendid isolation, a man of other worlds and other times who has but forbearance for the self-confidence of the future planners below. The awesome Californian scientific community has written off the dire prophecies of Huxley, Orwell and their generation as obsolete fantasies of another era. Glittering their insolent denial below are the million and one lights of the Los Angeles basin, the toolshop where man’s most daring dreams are invented, blueprinted, mocked up, prototyped and turned into streaks into the blue yonder. While whirling down the Summit Ridge Drive on a starry night after an evening heavy with Langian philosophy and Lily Latte’s mousse au chocolat, I have wondered if his essentially apocalyptic view of man’s future, which seems so out of place in the Californian never never land, is eminently personal or the inevitable conclusion of a generation which twice saw the world go up in flames. Mankind’s history is written thicker in blood than in poetry, and notions of brotherhood and the approaching century will not necessarily mark man’s mutation to braver worlds or final solutions to needs and inequity. To him, the twentieth century is Dachau and Hiroshima more than it is Einstein, acceleration of knowledge and humanitarianism through abundance. Lang doesn’t think highly of Man, but has indulgence for his arts. To a thinning circle of friends, he is a man of many moods, thoughts and beliefs, someone living intensely because these are the autumn years with their regrets of things left undone, but also someone at peace with the relativity of accomplishments. To compensate and to justify, he has become Francophil, pilgrim of festivals and citizen of Beverly Hills. He has never forgiven the Hitler folly, but Germans haven’t forgotten his exile and, like Marlene Dietrich, he is badly loved beyond the Rhine. This Viennese, who still sports the junker’s insolent monocle and knows more four-letter words than the Berlin cab-driving fraternity, has spent nearly half his life in America, but his vision has its origin in the atmosphere of a fallen Germany.
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