Rancho Notorious (1952), directed by Fritz Lang. This is the Fritz Lang who brought us such films as Die Nibelungen (2 films 1924), the Dr. Mabuse films, and most famously Metropolis (1927) and M (1931). He left Germany after the Nazis offered him a job. In America his most celebrated films are dark versions of cinema noir, but he seemed to like westerns. Aside from Rancho Notorious, Lang made The Return of Frank James (1940) and Western Union (1941). As for his western Rancho Notorious, this is a film that serves as a precursor to Lang's more famous noir, The Big Heat (1953). As in The Big Heat, we have a hero whose female partner (wife in The Big Heat and fiancé in Rancho Notorious) is murdered, setting the hero on a quest for revenge. The title song refers to "Hate, murder, and revenge," and this pretty much sums up the movie, the motivations, and the action. The various goings on, and there are many as the films skips around from place to place and time to time as it sets up its characters, especially this film's femme fatale, Altar Keane (Marlene Dietrich), involve secrecy and betrayal. As her name might suggest, Altar Keane receives the attention of many men who come to pay homage to her. She runs a place - a ranch/hideout for criminals on the lam - called Chuck-a-luck. Chuck-a-luck is also the name of a game of chance (sometimes called Birdcage) that uses three dice, and this game of chance hovers over the action. In this dark (and the technicolour in this film is dark, setting the noir mood) world the evil that people do will reverberate unhappily. All in all, this is hardly Lang's finest achievement, and the title song that sounds at intervals throughout the film does not help. The song is terrible, but then perhaps this jarring song accentuates the jarring action of a film that deals with chance, betrayal, oh and hate, murder, and revenge. Finally, I note that Bosley Crowther in the New York Times refers to Dietrich's "drowsy optics" in the film. He thinks she sleepwalks through the action. I think Altar Keane is preparation for a later and perhaps more telling version of this kind of character, Tanya, in Welles's Touch of Evil (1958). Seen in this light, Dietrich's "drowsy optics" might more richly be her world weariness, the reflection of a woman who has seen just about everything and learned to accept that all we can expect is, well the unexpected in a game of chance.