DESTINY EXPRESS by Howard A. Rodman (1990)

[j e l]

might be time to revisit this one. Pynchon sez: Daringly imagined and
darkly romantic—a moral thriller.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-03-11-bk-109-story.html

The Great Escape That Never Was: DESTINY EXPRESS by Howard A. Rodman
(Atheneum: $18.95; 192 pp.)
By Ernest Callenbach

March 11, 1990 12 AM PT

<i> Callenbach is the founder and editor of Film Quarterly, and editor of
film books at the University of California Press</i>

In her exquisite small novel, “Light,” Eva Figes told her story through the
eyes of the French Impressionist painter who was its central figure. Howard
Rodman has tried something similar here: telling the story of the great
film director Fritz Lang’s “escape” from Germany, as the Nazis came to
power in 1933, through the eyes of Lang and his scriptwriter wife, Thea von
Harbou.

It’s an intriguing idea, since Lang’s visual world was strongly defined--a
jagged, powerfully geometrical place of great good and great evil, often
expressing grim forebodings that Hitler’s rule was soon to render
murderously concrete.

Unfortunately, it’s a very difficult world to convey in words, compared to
the soft, sensuous flow of the Figes book, and Rodman brings it off only
fitfully, never really making Lang’s world look like a Lang film. But this
is not the only reason why the book is not very satisfying; puzzlingly, for
more than half its pages, Rodman keeps the dramatic materials of the legend
off-stage, and even a reader who knows the basic legend is likely to find
this frustrating.

Lang assiduously propagated the story (embroidering it more as the years
passed, his biographer Lotte Eisner wrote) that the very day Joseph
Goebbels, Hitler’s newly installed and demonic minster of propaganda, asked
him to head the Nazi film industry, the half-Jewish Lang got on the train
and escaped to Paris--not even waiting a day to get his money out of the
bank, the banks having closed when he left Goebbels’ office. Instead of
presiding over the Nazi “Potemkins” and “Ninotchkas” that Goebbels offered
him, Lang’s later career took him to Hollywood, while Von Harbou remained
in Berlin, working under the Nazis.

Rodman holds this back, the heart of his tale, until late in the book,
preceding it with an oblique and tedious account of the deteriorated
relationship between Lang and his collaborator-wife, who is having an
affair with a mysterious American. Tiny clues to the surrounding political
developments in Berlin pop up here and there, but unless you already care
about Lang and know something about the unhappy history of the times, you
probably won’t care too much about his emotional frame of mind concerning
Von Harbou.

Rodman does a decent job of conveying how Lang might have seen his domestic
world (he’s good at Lang’s perceptions of light and shadows, for instance),
but he doesn’t make it matter much to us. Lang and Von Harbou, in their own
stories, were hardly so reticent; they slapped the premises of their films
right in the viewer’s face, and if Rodman had tried to follow their
aesthetic in the framing of his story as well as in details of its
narration, he might have written a much more compelling book.

There also is a little problem about Rodman’s use of Lang’s legend: The
legend recently has been proven false. As Swedish historian Gosta Werner
has found (an article about all this will appear in the spring issue of
Film Quarterly), Lang’s passport has turned up in the German archives. It
shows that Lang in fact went in and out of Germany several times after his
probable interview with Goebbels (which is not mentioned in the evil
doctor’s usually meticulous diary); that he didn’t really leave Berlin for
good until many months later; that he did take a sizeable sum of money with
him on at least one occasion.

Nor was Lang so immediately allergic to the Nazis as he later implied: He
was one of the four major founders of the NTBO, set up to provide guidance
to the film makers of the new Reich a few days before he probably saw
Goebbels.

All this notwithstanding, Lang was one of the great film makers of all
time, and all Lang fans will find a certain fascination in Rodman’s effort
to dramatize the legend--a part of Lang’s creative life even if not of his
real life.

--jel