Everything about Fritz Lang totally explained
Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang (
December 5,
1890 –
August 2,
1976) was an
Austrian-
German-
American film director,
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.
Early life
Friedrich Lang was born in
Vienna, in what was then
Austria-Hungary, to Anton Lang (
August 1,
1860–
1940), an architect and construction company manager, and Pauline "Paula" Schlesinger (
July 26,
1864–
1920) 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 raised
Jewish from birth 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 of 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.
Early film work
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 the scripts for 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, 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
Metropolis 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.
Goebbels offer and emigration
Many of the rumours about Lang's life and career are hard to verify, including perhaps the most famous of all. The rumour has it 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, unbeknownst 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 can't 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's 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.
Life in America
Upon his arrival in
Hollywood, Lang joined the
MGM studio and directed the impressive 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. 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).
Late work and death
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, 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.
Returning to the United States in retirement, he continued collecting research material and drafting screenplays, though he never made another film. While his career had ended without fanfare, his American and later German works were championed by the critics of the
Cahiers du Cinema (one of whom,
Jean-Luc Godard, later cast Lang in
Contempt), in addition to considerable critical adulation in the US from critics such as
Peter Bogdanovich.
He died in
1976 and was interred in the
Forest Lawn - Hollywood Hills Cemetery in
Los Angeles.
Filmography
Cultural References
Lang is a supporting character in the animated movie . In the movie, he first introduces himself as "Mabuse," but later reveals that Mabuse is actually a character in his film
Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, and that his real name is Fritz Lang. He resembles the
Homunculus Pride.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Fritz Lang'.
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