Rancho Notorious

Proudly artificial, complete destructive pushing Lang's fatalism to extremes. It is a series of mirrors, violent impulses and movie tall tales allowed to cancel each other out. All three leads are remarkable pretty much because they seen so stylized removed of their western…

Filipe Furtado

The best metaphor I can think of for the gender politics in this movie is a scene in which Marlene Dietrich's character slyly wins some money off of a rigged roulette wheel. By all appearances to the bystanders, she's a tough, willful, risk-taking dame. What they can't see…

laird

very fierce gothic western, a prologue to the heist-western that would later be perfected by leone, walter hill and peckinpah, but perhaps most importantly, rancho notorious is a memorandum on dietrich's 'fallen woman' persona, becoming the emotional touchstone for a group…

comrade_yui

Incredible that Lang made like 10 movies after this. This is the dictionary definition of "Late Style."

Will Sloan

Arthur Kennedy's fiancé is raped and killed in a bank robbery and the trail leads to Dietrich's legendary hideaway for wanted men. Lang spins all sorts of plates at once, throwing in montages that play with both the genre's stereotypes and Dietrich's iconic legend, a…

Owen

Imperfect in the same exhilarating way that The Searchers is, as filmmakers struggle to explore themes that their chosen art form (studio film), genre (western), and its social context (1950s America) heavily limited the depiction of. Still, it can be tempting to give this…

Joe

You can take Lang out of the suffocating fear and loathing of the city but you can't, well, you know. A western that doesn't even deconstruct the idea of encroaching civilization so much as not even pretend there's such a concept at all. Paranoia and vice rule this amoral…

Jake Cole

“Rancho Notorious” brings the bloody fatalism of Fritz Lang’s noirs to the frontier. Or, at least — to a cardboard facsimile of the frontier.   In “Destry Rides Again,” Marlene Dietrich ruled over a throughly packed and lively two story bar hall. The room had as much…

theriverjordan

The idea is that the spectator should be put in a position where he can make comparisons about everything that influences the way in which human beings behave. This means, from the aesthetic point of view, that the actors' social gest becomes particularly important...The…

Avalyn Wu