Fritz Lang

Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang (December 5, 1890 – August 2, 1976) was an Austrian-German-American filmmaker, screenwriter and occasional film producer. One of the best known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the BFI. His most famous films are the groundbreaking Metropolis (the world's most expensive silent film at the time of its release) and M, made before he moved to the United States, where he contributed greatly to film noir.

Life

Friedrich Lang was born in Vienna, in what was then Austria-Hungary, to Anton Lang, an architect and construction company manager, and Pauline "Paula" Schlesinger on December 5, 1890. He was the second of two sons (his brother Adolf was nearly seven years older). Both his father and his mother were practicing Roman Catholics, although his mother was Jewish and converted to Catholicism when Fritz was ten. Lang himself was baptized at the Schottenkirche in Vienna.

After finishing high school, Lang briefly attended the Technical University of Vienna, where he studied civil engineering and eventually switched to art. In 1910 he left Vienna to see the world, traveling throughout Europe and Africa and later Asia and the Pacific area. In 1913, he studied painting in Paris, France. The next year, he returned home to Vienna at the outbreak of the First World War. In January 1914, he was drafted into service in the Austrian army and fought in Russia and Romania during World War I, where he was wounded three times.Template:Fact

Career

While recovering from his injuries and shell shock in 1916, he wrote some scenarios and ideas for films. He was discharged from the army with the rank of lieutenant in 1918 and did some acting in the Viennese theater circuit for a short time before being hired as a writer at Decla, Erich Pommer's Berlin-based production company. His writing stint was brief, as Lang soon started to work as a director at the German film studio Ufa, and later Nero-Film, just as the Expressionist movement was building. In this first phase of his career, Lang alternated between art films such as Der Müde Tod (Destiny, literally "Tired Death") and populist thrillers such as Die Spinnen (Spiders), combining popular genres with Expressionist techniques to create an unprecedented synthesis of popular entertainment with art cinema. In 1920, he met his future wife, the writer and actress Thea von Harbou. She and Lang co-wrote all of his movies from 1921 through 1933, including 1922's Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse the Gambler), which ran for four hours in two parts in the original version and was the first in the Dr. Mabuse trilogy, 1924's Die Nibelungen, the famed 1927 masterpiece Metropolis, and the 1931 classic, M, his first "talking" picture.

Although some consider Lang's work to be simple melodrama, he produced a coherent oeuvre that helped to establish the characteristics of film noir, with its recurring themes of psychological conflict, paranoia, fate and moral ambiguity. His work influenced filmmakers as disparate as Jacques Rivette and William Friedkin. In 1931, between Woman in the Moon and Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, Lang directed what many film scholars consider to be his masterpiece: M, a disturbing story of a child murderer (Peter Lorre in his first starring role) who is hunted down and brought to rough justice by Berlin's criminal underworld. M remains a powerful work; it was remade in 1951 by Joseph Losey, but this version had little impact on audiences, and has become harder to see than the original film. Lang epitomized the stereotype of the tyrannical German film director such as Erich von Stroheim and Otto Preminger; he was known for being hard to work with. During the climactic final scene in M, he allegedly threw Peter Lorre down a flight of stairs in order to give more authenticity to Lorre's battered look. He even wore a monocle that added to the stereotype.

Upon his arrival in Hollywood, Lang joined the MGM studio and directed the crime drama Fury. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1939. Lang made twenty-one features in the next twenty-one years, working in a variety of genres at every major studio in Hollywood, occasionally producing his films as an independent. These films, often compared unfavourably by contemporary critics to Lang's earlier works, have since been reevaluated as being integral to the emergence and evolution of American genre cinema, film noir in particular. During the 1950s, Lang found it harder to find congenial production conditions in Hollywood and his advancing age left him less inclined to grapple with American backers. The German producer, Artur Brauner, was expressing interest in remaking not only The Indian Tomb (a story that Lang had developed in the twenties that was ultimately taken from him by studio heads and directed instead by Joe May) but also Lang's earlier Doctor Mabuse pictures. Fearing that Brauner would proceed with or without his assent, Lang abandoned his plans for retirement and returned to Germany in order to make his Indian Epic, which is regarded as a masterpiece by a number of film scholars today. Following the production, Brauner was ready to proceed with his remake of Das Testament des Doctor Mabuse when Lang approached him with the idea of adding another original film to the series. The result was The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), made in a hurry and with a relatively small budget. It can be viewed as the marriage between the director's early experiences with expressionist techniques in Germany as well as the spartan style already visible in his late American work. Lang was approaching blindness during the production, making it his final project.

One of his most famous film noirs is the police drama The Big Heat (1953), noted for its uncompromising brutality, especially for a scene in which Lee Marvin throws scalding coffee on Gloria Grahame's face. During this period, his visual style simplified (owing in part to the constraints of the Hollywood studio system) and his worldview became increasingly pessimistic, culminating in the cold, geometric style of his last American films, While the City Sleeps (1956) and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1957).

Goebbels rumor

Many of the rumors about Lang's life and career are hard to verify. The most famous rumor is that Joseph Goebbels called Lang to his offices for a meeting in which he gave Lang two pieces of news. The first was that his most recent film, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, 1933) was being banned as an incitement to public disorder. The second was that he was nevertheless so impressed by Lang's abilities as a filmmaker, he was offering Lang a position as the head of German film studio UFA. Lang had been, unbeknown to Goebbels, already planning to leave Germany for Paris, but the meeting with Goebbels ran so long that the banks were closed by the time it finished, and Lang fled that night without his money, not to return until after the war.

The problem is that many portions of the story cannot be checked, and of those that can, most are contradicted by the evidence: Lang actually left Germany with most of his money, unlike most refugees, and made several return trips later in the same year. There were, of course, no witnesses to the meeting besides Goebbels and Lang, but Goebbels's appointment books, when they refer to the meeting, mention only the banning of Testament. No evidence has been discovered in any of Goebbels's writings to affirm the suggestion that he was planning to offer Lang any position. Jean-Luc Godard's film Contempt (1963), in which Lang appeared as himself, presents a bare outline of the story as fact.

Whatever the truth of this story, it is known that Lang did in fact leave Germany in 1934 and moved to Paris, where he filmed a version of Ferenc Molnar's Liliom, starring Charles Boyer. This was Lang's only film in French (not counting the French version of Testament). He then went to the United States. Lang's wife Thea von Harbou, who had started to sympathize with the Nazis in the early 1930s and joined the Nazi party (the NSDAP) in 1932, stayed behind. The two were divorced in 1933.

While his career had ended without fanfare, his American and later German works were championed by the critics of the Cahiers du Cinema. Lang died in 1976 and was interred in the Forest Lawn - Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles.

Filmography

Silent films

Year	Title	Studio	Genre	Cast	Notes	Other Roles
1910's
1919	Halbblut The Half-Breed	Decla-Bioscop	Fantasy	Ressel Orla, Carl de Vogt, Gilda Langer	Lost film	Writer
1919	Der Herr der Liebe Master of Love	Helos Film	Romance	Carl de Vogt, Gilda Langer	Partially lost film	Actor
1919	Die Spinnen, 1. Teil: Der Goldene See The Spiders, art 1: The Golden Lake	Decla-Bioscop	Adventure	Carl de Vogt, Ressel Orla, George John, Lil Dagover		Writer
1919	Harakiri Madame Butterfly	Decla-Bioscop	Drama	Lil Dagover
1920's
1920	Die Spinnen, 2. Teil: Das Brillantenschiff The Spiders, Part 2: The Diamond Ship	Decla-Bioscop	Adventure	Carl de Vogt, Ressel Orla, George John, Lil Dagover		Writer
1920	Das Wandernde Bild The Wandering Image	May-Film	Romance	Mia May, Hans Marr	Partially lost film	Writer
1921	Vier um die Frau Four Around a Woman	Decla-Bioscop	Drama	Carola Toelle, Rudolf Klein-Rogge	Partially lost film	Writer
1921	Der müde Tod Destiny	Decla-Bioscop	Fantasy	Lil Dagover, Walter Janssen, Bernhard Goetzke, Rudolf Klein-Rogge		Writer, Editor
1922	Dr. Mabuse der Spieler Dr. Mabuse the Gambler	Uco-Film	Thriller	Rudolf Klein-Rogge		Writer
1924	Die Nibelungen: Siegfried Siegfried	Decla-Bioscop	Fantasy	Paul Richter, Margarete Schöen, Hanna Ralph, Theodor Loos		Writer
1924	Die Nibelungen: Kriemhelds Rache Kriemhild's Revenge	Decla-Bioscop	Fantasy	Margarete Schöen, Hans Adalbert Schlettow, Theodor Loos
1927	Metropolis	UFA Film	Science Fiction	Alfred Abel, Brigitte Helm, Gustav Fröhlich, Rudolf Klein-Rogge		Writer
1928	Spione Spies	UFA Film	Thriller	Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Gerda Maurus, Willy Fritsch		Writer
1929	Die Frau im Mond The Woman in the Moon	UFA Film	Science Fiction	Willy Fritsch, Gerda Maurus, Klaus Pohl		Writer, Producer

Sound films

Year	Title	Studio	Genre	Cast	Notes	Other Roles
1930's
1931	M	Nero-Film	Thriller	Peter Lorre		Writer
1933	Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse The Testament of Dr. Mabuse	Nero-Film	Thriller	Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Otto Wernicke		Writer, Producer
1933	Le Testament du Dr. Mabuse	Nero-Film	Thriller	Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Jim Gérald	French version of Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse / Co-directed with René Sti	Writer
1934	Liliom	Fox Europa	Fantasy	Charles Boyer, Madeleine Ozeray		Writer
1936	Fury	MGM	Drama	Spencer Tracy, Sylvia Sidney		Writer
1937	You Only Live Once	Walter Wanger Productions	Film-noir	Sylvia Sidney, Henry Fonda
1938	You and Me	Paramount Pictures	Drama	Sylvia Sidney, George Raft		Producer
1940's
1940	The Return of Frank James	20th Century Fox	Western	Henry Fonda, Gene Tierney, Jackie Cooper	Technicolor film
1941	Western Union	20th Century Fox	Western	Randolph Scott, Robert Young, Dean Jagger, Virginia Gilmore	Technicolor film
1941	Man Hunt	20th Century Fox	Thriller	Walter Pidgeon, Joan Bennett, George Sanders
1942	Moontide	20th Century Fox	Drama	Jean Gabin, Ida Lupino, Thomas Mitchell, Claude Rains	Replaced by Archie Mayo during filming
1943	Hangmen Also Die!	Arnold Pressburger films	War Drama	Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, Brian Donlevy, Walter Brennan, Anna Lee		Writer, Producer
1944	Ministry of Fear	Paramount Pictures	Film-noir	Ray Milland, Marjorie Reynolds
1944	The Woman in the Window	International Pictures	Film-noir	Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Raymond Massey
1945	Scarlet Street	Fritz Lang Productions	Film-noir	Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Dan Duryea		Producer
1946	Cloak and Dagger	United States Pictures	Drama	Gary Cooper, Lilli Palmer
1948	Secret Beyond the Door	Diana Production Company	Thriller	Joan Bennett, Michael Redgrave		Producer
1950's
1950	House by the River	Fidelity Pictures	Film-noir	Louis Hayward, Lee Bowman, Jane Wyatt
1950	[American Guerrilla in the Philippines	20th Century Fox	War Drama	Tyrone Power, Micheline Presie	Technicolor film
1952	Rancho Notorious	Fidelity Pictures	Western	Marlene Dietrich, Arthur Kennedy, Mel Ferrer	Technicolor film
1952	Clash by Night	Wald-Krasna Productions	Film-noir	Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Ryan, Paul Douglas, Marilyn Monroe
1953	The Blue Gardenia	Blue Gardenia Productions	Film-noir	Anne Baxter, Richard Conte, Ann Sothern, Raymond Burr
1953	The Big Heat	Columbia Pictures	Film-noir	Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Lee Marvin, Jeanette Nolan
1954	[Human Desire	Columbia Pictures	Film-noir	Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Broderick Crawford
1955	Moonfleet	MGM	Adventure	Stewart Granger, George Sanders, Joan Greenwood	Color film
1956	While the City Sleeps	Bert E. Friedlob Productions	Film-noir	Dana Andrews, Rhonda Fleming, George Sanders
1957	Beyond a Reasonable Doubt	Bert E. Friedlob Productions	Film-noir	Dana Andrews, Rhonda Fleming, George Sanders
1959	Der Tiger von Eschnapur The Tiger of Eschnapur	Central Cinema Company Film	Adventure	Debra Paget, Paul Hubschmid, Walter Reyer	Technicolor film
1959	Das indische Grabmal The Indian Tomb	Central Cinema Company Film	Adventure	Debra Paget, Paul Hubschmid, Walter Reyer	Eastmancolor film	Writer
1960's
1960	Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse	Central Cinema Company Film	Thriller	Dawn Addams, Peter van Eyck, Gert Fröbe		Writer, Producer

Further reading

• McGilligan, Patrick. Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast; New York: St. Martins Press, 1997; ISBN 0312132476
• Friedrich, Otto. City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s; New York: Harper & Row, 1986; ISBN 0-06-015626-0 (See e.g. pp. 45–46 for anecdotes revealing Lang's arrogance.)
• Schnauber, Cornelius. Fritz Lang in Hollywood; Wien: Europaverlag, c1986; ISBN 3203509539 (in German)
• Template:Citation/core -- Contains interviews with Fritz Lang and a discussion of the making of the film M.

External links

• Fritz Lang at IMDB
• Fritz Lang Bibliography (via UC Berkeley Media Resources Center)
• Senses of Cinema - Biographie
• Fritz Lang at filmportal.de
• Interview with Fritz Lang from 1967
• Bibliography