Visto Venerdì pomeriggio nel discreto dvd Warner Archive (niente sottotitoli, unico extra il trailer, master buono). È l’ultimo film del periodo americano di Lang, con uno script molto interessante e un finale arricchito da un doppio colpo di scena difficilmente prevedibile. Il budget è risicato e si vede, Dana Andrews & Joan Fontaine sono due attori ormai verso il sunset boulevard, ma a mio avviso rimane un classico esempio di certi noir a stelle e strisce: solido script e produzione (anche se all’osso), attori professionisti e un regista con le palle che dirige il tutto. Mi fu consigliato da Lenzi durante una discussione, in effetti il film merita assai. Ne hanno fatto un remake con Michael Douglas nel 2009, ma a quanto pare è una schifezza.
Del film era appassionato Godard, in rete ho trovato questa bel commento di un cinefilo:
Lang being Lang, he can’t leave well enough alone, and the last 15 minutes of the film leads to a series of stunning reversals that leave you questioning everything you have seen and heard for the previous 75 minutes, like a hole has been ripped in the fabric of reality. Only after you’ve watched the film a second time is it clear that Lang shot not one film, but two, with the second occurring largely off-screeen, gradually invading the space of the nominal shoddy narrative you have been watching. Lang’s doppelganger, unacknowledged pupil and arch-rival Hitchcock attempted a similar trick in Stage Fright (another unloved film), and it felt like a trick. Lang’s film feels like the author’s last grim laugh at his audience, and the medium he had served since 1917, a revelation that here was an artist who could do anything he wanted to, including bend reality, even in the most unpromising production circumstances imaginable. The secret? His architetural sense of camera movement, blocking, and camera placement. While Hitchcock liked to have us identify with individuals trapped in nightmares, Lang showed us the structure of the trap itself – which makes him a social, and not a psychological artist. I am guessing the poverty of this film’s production tempted him to push his style to an extreme of abstraction, the result being a highly cerebral great movie trapped inside a bad one.
Molto interessante questo essay, da leggersi esclusivamente DOPO la visione del film:
The Hand
Jacques Rivette