GERM’ WARFARE

Proceed with caution—Nazi crossing.


Marjorie Reynolds gives her best transfixed look in this promo image made for her 1944 film noir Ministry of Fear. The swastika leaves no doubt who the villains are. They take over a New York City brownstone and use it as a base of operations for various dastardly doings. The film is uneven despite being helmed by the legendary Fritz Lang. Reynolds, who also acted under her real name Marjorie Goodspeed, as well as Marjorie Moore, appeared in dozens of movies but wasn’t quite what you’d call a star. Her signature moment probably came when she sang the song, “White Christmas,” in the 1942 film Holiday Inn. She performed it twice—once solo, and once as a duet with Bing Crosby. She didn’t appear in many crime movies or thrillers, so we probably won’t see her here again, but this is quite a shot to go out on. You can read what we wrote about Ministry of Fear here

In the Ministry of Fear they bake better than they spy.


Fritz Lang was one of the most important directors of his era, both in his native Germany and in the U.S., and was a pioneer of the film noir form. Movies like Scarlet Street and especially The Big Heat are essential noir viewing. Ministry of Fear dates from a bit earlier and finds Lang saddled with what we consider to be a substandard script that through sheer artistry he makes into a watchable film. Ray Milland, Marjorie Reynolds, and Dan Duryea headline in a spy tale that revolves around Lang’s favorite villains—the Nazis. Jewish and German, he left his homeland for Paris and beyond during the ascent of the Nazis during the 1930s, so the subject was personal for him, and was one he’d dealt with in previous films such as Cloak and Dagger and Hangmen Also Die.

In Ministry of Fear Milland plays a man who spends two years in a British asylum and is released at a time when World War II is raging and London is being bombed. He goes to a charity carnival and is enticed into guessing a cake’s weight for a chance to win it, and because he’s been given the correct answer by a fortuneteller, is victorious. But it’s soon clear that the correct weight wasn’t supposed to be given to him, and he isn’t supposed to have won the cake. But he really wants it and resists attempts by the carny folks to take it back. He loses it during a train ride when a passenger beats the snot out of him for it, and at that point finally realizes the obvious—sweet though this confection may have been, it wasn’t sought by various and sundry for its flavor, but because inside was something important. He wants answers, and he’ll have to risk his neck to get them.

Generally with movies it’s best to simply accept the premise, but there are limits. We were never clear on why it was necessary to put this important item in a cake. We understand subterfuge is involved in the spy game, but why not just hand the item over in an alley, or a pub bathroom, or a parked car? And if food must be involved, why a cake? Why not a haggis, or something else very few people want to just gobble up on the spot? A dried cod maybe. A blood sausage would have done. Plus they’re easy to transport. You can just stick them in your pockets. And in a tight spot a whack across the nose with a blood sausage is far more effective than shoving cake in someone’s mug. The cake gimmick was probably—strike that—certainly better explained in Graham Greene’s source novel. We haven’t read it but we’re confident about that. It could have been Lang who screwed the pooch, but it was more likely Seton I. Miller. He was screenwriter as well as executive producer.

In any case Milland bumbles his way through a train trip, across a moor, in and out of a crazy séance, and into a maze of misdirection to the eventual revelation of what’s inside the cake, but the whole time we kept thinking the movie should be called Ministry of Cut-Rate Spies. We don’t mean to say it’s a total loss. It isn’t like the Eddie Izzard comedy routine, “Cake or Death.” You won’t choose death over cake. But it’s a pretty uninspiring flick. The old dramas that have survived have done so for a simple reason. Most of them are good. Ministry of Fear isn’t bad. It’s just meh. It’s like a cake that fell—it’s flat and dense, but teases you with how yummy it could have been. It premiered in England today in 1944.

Here, have your cake. And eat it too. Heh.

I prefer blood sausage for train trips, but I guess it’s better for you I’m not shoving one of those in your face, eh?

Wow, you sort of… crush the shit out of your cake before eating it.

Have I been eating cake wrong the whole time I’ve been in England?
 
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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1935—Jury Finds Hauptmann Guilty

A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh. Hauptmann is sentenced to death and executed in 1936. For decades, his widow Anna, fights to have his named cleared, claiming that Hauptmann did not commit the crime, and was instead a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, but her claims are ultimately dismissed in 1984 after the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to address the case.

1961—Soviets Launch Venus Probe

The U.S.S.R. launches the spacecraft Venera 1, equipped with scientific instruments to measure solar wind, micrometeorites, and cosmic radiation, towards planet Venus. The craft is the first modern planetary probe. Among its many achievements, it confirms the presence of solar wind in deep space, but overheats due to the failure of a sensor before its Venus mission is completed.

1994—Thieves Steal Munch Masterpiece

In Oslo, Norway, a pair of art thieves steal one of the world’s best-known paintings, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” from a gallery in the Norwegian capital. The two men take less than a minute to climb a ladder, smash through a window of the National Art Museum, and remove the painting from the wall with wire cutters. After a ransom demand the museum refuses to pay, police manage to locate the panting in May, and the two thieves, as well as two accomplices, are arrested.

1938—BBC Airs First Sci-Fi Program

BBC Television produces the first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of Czech writer Karel Capek’s dark play R.U.R., aka, Rossum’s Universal Robots. The robots in the play are not robots in the modern sense of machines, but rather are biological entities that can be mistaken for humans. Nevertheless, R.U.R. featured the first known usage of the term “robot”.

1962—Powers Is Traded for Abel

Captured American spy pilot Gary Powers, who had been shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960 while flying a U-2 high-altitude jet, is exchanged for captured Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, who had been arrested in New York City in 1957.

Cover art by Roswell Keller for the 1948 Pocket Books edition of Ramona Stewart's Desert Town.
Rare Argentinian cover art for The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

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