Yesterday, I mentioned that Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious (1952) was available through Warner Archive. Today I came across an interview with the picture’s cinematographer, Hal Mohr, in Leonard Maltin’s The Art Of The Cinematographer:
Hal Mohr: “I think Fritz Lang is a hell of a good director… but I don’t like people who abuse people… He got very abusive to some of my camera crew. So one day I finally had to have it out with him; it was a very unhappy occasion. But I finished the picture. Howard Welsch was the producer, and I wanted to get off the picture, I wanted to quit. Howard prevailed upon me to stay — and Lang wanted to fire me, he wanted me to get off the picture. So we never talked to each other for a long time, we just went ahead and did the work.”
Lang told Peter Bogdanovich (from Fritz Lang In America): “I wanted to write a picture about an aging (but still very desirable) dance hall girl and an old gun hand, who is not so good on the draw any more. So I constructed this story. Now, Marlene resented going gracefully into a little, tiny bit older category; she became younger and younger until finally it was hopeless. She also ganged up with one actor against another actor; it was not a very pleasant thing.”
Sound like a happy set?
The best gossip about RANCHO NOTORIOUS (a deliriously weird movie) is that the screenwriter, Silvia Richards, was bangin’ Lang when she wrote it. She later finked for HUAC and married A. I. Bezzerides (not necessarily in that order)!
Shame they weren’t doing making-of documentaries to stick on the DVDs back then!