As we browsed our local video store last weekend, my friend and I were at the directors’ wall and I picked up Ministry of Fear, prompting my companion to tease me for being on such a Fritz Lang kick lately. I’m now decently familiar with his pre-Hollywood films, having seen (and loved) Metropolis, M, and Die Nibelungen, and I’ve seen some of his Hollywood noirs both pre-(Fury) and post-(The Blue Gardenia) WWII. I was curious what he was up to in the years leading up to and during the war, however, especially if he was doing any of the same kind of espionage thrillers that Alfred Hitchcock was churning out consistently, with his pre-war thrillers (The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Sabotage, and The Lady Vanishes) presaging the troubles to come, his wartime pictures (The Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur) highlighting the contemporary cost of war and the paranoia of the homefront, and his immediate post-war films (Notorious) dealing with the aftermath. Lang, perhaps because he was more personally affected by the war, didn’t deal with the subject very much at the time. His 1943 film Hangmen Also Die! was loosely based on the assassination of Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich, with his following feature in 1944, Ministry of Fear, being the only other time he touched on the subject, other than in post-war flick Cloak and Dagger, which echoes Notorious in that it follows someone tasked with finding Germans who have run to ground. 

Stephen Neale (Ray Milland) departs the Lembridge Asylum, where he has lived for some number of years. He makes his way to the train station, where the ticket clerk recommends he visit the village’s fundraising fête to kill time while waiting for passage to London. After entering the drawing to win a cake by guessing the exact weight, he goes to the fortune teller’s tent. Once he crosses the matronly Mrs. Bellane’s palm with silver, she gives him the ordinary spiel about love, but when he grows defensive about a past relationship, she instead tells him the precise weight of the cake, which he wins. Neale departs with the cake over the protests of a young man who arrives just as he’s leaving, and it’s clear that he was the one who was “supposed” to win. Just before the train to London leaves the station, Neale is joined by a blind man in his carriage. When he offers a piece of the cake to the man, he notices that he’s crumbling it instead of eating it, as if searching for something, but before he has much time to ponder this, the train stops due to a Nazi air raid, and the “blind” man makes off with the cake after beating Neale with his cane. Neale pursues him, and the man takes shelter in a derelict cabin to shoot back at him, only for the raid to blow the structure to pieces. 

Once he makes it to London, Neale engages private detective George Rennit (Erskine Sanford) to help him figure out who’s trying to kill him, and their investigation leads them back around to the Mothers of Free Nations, the charity that had organized the Lembridge fête. Neale meets siblings Willi (Carl Esmond) and Carla (Marjorie Reynolds, of Holiday Inn) Hilfe, who run the organization, and Willi agrees to help Neale make sense of things. To that end, they visit Mrs. Bellane, only to discover that, instead of the older woman Neale met in Lembridge, she’s a young, beautiful woman (Hillary Brooke, who appeared as one of the inconsiderate houseguests in Maisie Was a Lady). She invites them to attend the seance she’s hosting, and Neale meets fellow guest Dr. Forrester, a psychiatrist. The last person to arrive is the same man who tried to take the cake from Neale at the fête, and who is introduced as Mr. Cost. During the seance, a woman’s voice calls out, accusing Neale of killing her. Neale grows upset, and a shot rings out. When the lights come up, Dr. Forrester pronounces Cost dead, and suspicion falls upon Neale, who escapes. He attempts to reunite with Rennit at his office, but finds it ransacked. When another bombing forces him to take shelter with Carla, he explains the reason that he was institutionalized in Lembridge, and what it had to do with his wife’s death. With an unknown man (Percy Waram) tailing him everywhere he goes, presumably at the behest of the spy ring that has infiltrated the Mothers of Free Nations, he begins to fall for Carla, while remaining unsure where her allegiance lies. When he learns that Forrester has connections within the British government, he sets out to expose the league of spies before they can deliver intel about troop deployments to their German allies, but his veracity is challenged by his troubled past. 

Unfortunately, Ministry of Fear is little more than a knockoff Hitchcock, complete with a McGuffin, a wrongfully accused fugitive, a fight on a train, and a blonde love interest. In fact, one could easily mistake this for a Hitchcock film, were it not for the fact that the police in Ministry are shockingly competent. It has a few interesting things going for it, but it’s ultimately fairly run of the mill. This appears to have been a product of executive meddling, as reportedly neither Lang nor Graham Greene, who wrote the novel on which the film was based, were very happy with the final product. By opening with Neale being released from an asylum, rather than a prison, the film implies that he might have been there for reasons relating to his mental state, and there was a potentially rich narrative question about just how much we could trust our lead which could have been mined, but the film never chooses to go there. Some of Lang’s trademark visual flair comes through; the obliteration of Neale’s “blind” attacker by an air raid is a shocking site, and I was also particularly taken with a sequence in a tailor’s shop near the end that’s shot mostly in the reflection of a floor-to-ceiling mirror. The seance sequence is effectively spooky as well, and it was an inspired touch to have the only light in the final gunfight sequence be provided by the flash of muzzle fire. Alas, it’s not quite enough to propel this one to greatness, and I can really only recommend this to Lang completists and anyone curious about what his take on a Hitchcock style plot would be.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond