Ministry of Fear is a perfectly agreeable and mostly engaging and fun War-time Film-Noir about a recently released asylum patient (Ray Milland, no fake bats to react to this time, though, that would come a year later), who gets embroiled in a very strange group who perform a séance - this, of course, comes after he has already had a prized cake (meaning he won it in a prize at a fair - a fortune teller told him the weight to say to win it, despite all the suspicious eyes over it) and a person is shot in the midst of a struggle in a dark room. He's convinced there's a Nazi spy ring, but how can he prove it? Will someone find that missing and/or explosive cake? What a tasty MacGuffin we got here!
All of this sounds quite promising, especially as Milland can and does play a convincing Man In Over His Head type, and Lang and his cinematographer give spaces moods of portent and mystery, both in how sometimes characters are facing one another in the same shot (notice who has power and who doesn't), and what we can or can't see in the dark. And I love the set piece with the cake being stolen as the two men stagger over what looks to be a battlefield right off to the side of the train (then again it is war-time Britain, after all). If the movie is just "good" and not great, that may be in part from expectations - maybe unfair, maybe not - with other Fritz Lang Noir thrillers, and he made some of the best of them (maybe with the unofficial first one in "M" 1931).
Why it's simply "good" in the canon is down to the storytelling not giving a lot for Lang to work with, and he complained about that; the writer was also the producer on the film, Miller, and he reportedly hamstrung Lang in re-writing the script. So if it may not have the power and punch of the previous year's Hangmen Also Die (written by "Bert" Brecht), that could be why. Basically, the details of the story are laid out more simply than one might want, and while there's terrific atmosphere and a couple of good conniving performances for the Nazi characters (of course Dan Duryea, but also Marjorie Reynolds), there aren't a lot of other memorable side characters, save maybe the seemingly mild-mannered man on the train who sets the plot in second gear.
Ministry of Fear has some decent twists, a committed Milland performance (if not quite at Dial M for Murder or The Big Clock level of memorable), and a final line that should set all the old ladies watching this in a chuckle to leave the theater. It's nice Escapist entertainment that, unlike the best of Lang, won't stay with you for too long after it ends.
All of this sounds quite promising, especially as Milland can and does play a convincing Man In Over His Head type, and Lang and his cinematographer give spaces moods of portent and mystery, both in how sometimes characters are facing one another in the same shot (notice who has power and who doesn't), and what we can or can't see in the dark. And I love the set piece with the cake being stolen as the two men stagger over what looks to be a battlefield right off to the side of the train (then again it is war-time Britain, after all). If the movie is just "good" and not great, that may be in part from expectations - maybe unfair, maybe not - with other Fritz Lang Noir thrillers, and he made some of the best of them (maybe with the unofficial first one in "M" 1931).
Why it's simply "good" in the canon is down to the storytelling not giving a lot for Lang to work with, and he complained about that; the writer was also the producer on the film, Miller, and he reportedly hamstrung Lang in re-writing the script. So if it may not have the power and punch of the previous year's Hangmen Also Die (written by "Bert" Brecht), that could be why. Basically, the details of the story are laid out more simply than one might want, and while there's terrific atmosphere and a couple of good conniving performances for the Nazi characters (of course Dan Duryea, but also Marjorie Reynolds), there aren't a lot of other memorable side characters, save maybe the seemingly mild-mannered man on the train who sets the plot in second gear.
Ministry of Fear has some decent twists, a committed Milland performance (if not quite at Dial M for Murder or The Big Clock level of memorable), and a final line that should set all the old ladies watching this in a chuckle to leave the theater. It's nice Escapist entertainment that, unlike the best of Lang, won't stay with you for too long after it ends.