Find Me Guilty
It’s inevitable that Warner Archive’s new releases of Fritz Lang’s While the City Sleeps and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (both 1956) look Lilliputian when compared to Kino Lorber’s recent Blu-ray box set of the filmmaker’s complete extant silent works. But no less than the monumentalism of the latter, the deceptive modesty of the former attests to the breadth of Lang’s vision. Shot back to back for RKO on noticeably low budgets, the films have the cheapjack urgency that could have been ripped from the headlines of the newspapers that play central roles in each film (the introductory title card of While the City Sleeps sets the action in “New York City…Tonight!”). But when viewed together, the overall effect is one of retrospection, summation, even exhaustion—a ruthlessly clear-eyed testament to the failure of the American experiment from an émigré who was about to bid farewell (at least professionally) to the country he had adopted in exile two decades previously.
Nominally, both films represent a return to the social-problem pictures Lang had made in his first ventures in Hollywood, with ’ media sensationalism replacing (1936) and doubling down on the capital-punishment screed first delivered in (1937). Here, however, the director shifts his gaze from (more or less) wrongly accused innocents to those whose crimes are rarely recognized as such. “Not everyone who does wrong is considered a criminal by society or by themselves,” Lang remarked of these films in 1975, and in both and he insistently shows that immorality and murky ethics are at play not only on city streets and in back alleys, but also in the nation’s courtrooms, newsrooms, and living rooms—those tidy, hygienic institutions by which American society defines itself.
