“Cinemascope is not for men, but for snakes and funerals.”-Fritz Lang
Rancho Notorious (1952) is not unique in its inversion of the traditional female role in Westerns. Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954) and Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns (1957) accomplish this with more style and aptitude. What Rancho Notorious has that makes it something unique during the height of the Westerns’ popularity in the United States is Fritz Lang.
Coming from years of working at Ufa as one of Germany’s most successful directing talents, Lang brings not just his experience, but weds that experience with his own sense of disenfranchisement that he was experiencing in America. Lang’s own struggle to connect with American culture is in no film more apparent that Rancho Notorious. Early in the film there is a montage in which Arthur Kennedy travels about looking for the man who killed his lover. This montage resembles, in pace and content, those of M (1931) and Metropolis (1927). Similarly, when Arthur Kennedy recognizes his lover’s broach on Marlene Dietrich in the scene where they first meet the lighting as well as the camera’s proximity to Kennedy recreate a number of similar shots of similar emotional content in Lang’s Dr. Mabuse The Gambler (1922). The most striking sequence in the film in terms of technique occurs in the scene where Kennedy gets into a brawl at a barbershop. This scene, unlike any other in Lang’s career to that point, features a roaming camera whose focus is the action. That simple choice of camera work gives the scene a realism to its violence that is, even today, uncomfortable simply because it is not at all what one expects. The fight from Rancho Notorious would recreate itself the following year though in Lang’s The Big Heat (1953).
It’s in these distinctly expressionistic tactics cited above that the audience finds the sense of “other worldliness” in Rancho Notorious. It is an unreality more violent, more sexual than one is accustomed to in Westerns of this time. And it is through this phenomenon that discerning viewers may realize that the “other worldliness” of Rancho Notorious is, at least for Lang, representative of his view of the United States.
