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Fritz Lang

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Friedrich Anton Christian Lang (December 5, 1890 – August 2, 1976) was an Austrian film director, screenwriter and occasional film producer, one of the best known émigrés from Germany's school of expressionism. 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 and career

File:Metropolis-new-tower-of-babel.jpg
Metropolis - Lang's famous 1927 science fiction movie

Friedrich Lang was born in Vienna, in the former 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 born Jewish and only converted to Catholicism when Fritz was ten.[1] 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. 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 (The Weary Death) and populist thrillers such as Die Spinnen (The Spiders; a two-part film), 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 four hours in two parts in the original version and was the first in the Dr. Mabuse trilogy, 1924's Die Nibelungen (The Death), the famed 1927 masterpiece Metropolis, and the 1931 Peter Lorre classic, M, his first "talking" picture.

The Goebbels myth

Many of the stories about Lang's life and career are hard to verify, including perhaps the most famous Lang story of all. The legend 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) 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. 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 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. Whatever the truth of this legend, 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. He then went to the United States. His wife Thea von Harbou had started to sympathize with the Nazis in the early 1930s and stayed behind. She joined the NSDAP (Nazi Party) in 1932, leading to a divorce the following year.

The aging Lang appeared as himself in Jean-Luc Godard's film Contempt (1963) in which the barest outline of this story is presented as fact.

Metropolis, M and his life in America

File:1m-film.jpg
Fritz Lang's M is an important early work

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 trial 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.

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. 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).

Lang as a director

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 wore a monocle that added to the stereotype (though film historians say this particular cliché began with von Stroheim), and his image has been parodied in a number of media, including GWAR's long form video Phallus in Wonderland.

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 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 Die Tausend Augen des Dr. Mabuse (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 work went through a reappraisal in later years following Jean-Luc Godard's decision to cast him in his film Le Mépris in addition to considerable critical adulation in the US from the likes of Peter Bogdanovich.

He died in 1976 and was interred in the Forest Lawn - Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles.

Trivia

  • All of Lang's films feature a shot of his hand.
  • His inspiration for Metropolis was the New York City skyline of the late 1920's.
  • Lisa Rosenthal, Lang's first wife, committed suicide in 1921 by shooting herself in the chest. Little else is known about her, she was apparently a Russian Jew from Vilna. However, it was and is believed by some that her suicide was perhaps brought on by the discovery of an affair her husband may have been having with his "friend", Thea von Harbou, whom he married about a year later. It has also been suggested that Lang shot his wife himself, in order to marry von Harbou. In all likelihood, though, the latter story was nothing more than a nasty rumor that spread easily simply due to Lang's bad reputation in Hollywood. According to some documents, 1919 may have been the year Lang wed her.
  • The monocle that became his trademark was likely not a prescribed lens and was allegedly worn only for dramatic effect.
  • He collected primitive art.
  • Lang was portrayed in the 2005 animated Japanese film Fullmetal Alchemist the Movie: Conqueror of Shamballa. In his first appearance in the film (which is set in 1921 Munich), he disguises himself as an elderly Jewish filmmaker named "Mabuse", who is traveling through Germany searching for a dragon in an ancient castle. His identity is revealed later on, when he invites the lead character Edward Elric to the set of Die Nibelungen. After hearing Edward's description of his world, "Mabuse"/Lang decides to aid him in his quest to return home.
  • Lang never publically acknowledged his older brother Adolf (or "Dolf"), who was born March 19, 1884. Nothing else is know about him except the fact that he was a few inches shorter than Fritz (he was 5'11 while his brother was 6') and that he took no interest in artistic pursuits, and in time became a staid businessman like his father--a bank manager; in fact, utterly middle class. It is unsure if he got married and/or had children.
  • Dorothy Parker is said to have once commented, "There's a man who got where he is by the sweat of his Frau," implying that Thea von Harbou was actually responsible for much of Lang's success.
  • In 1971 Lang wed his long-time girlfriend Lily Latté (1891-1984), they met in 1926 while Latté was the secretary personnal of Lang. After Lang fled Germany she followed him in his campaigns against the nazis and they soon became engaged. the mariage was so secret that they were not officials documents. The mariage lasted until Lang's death.

Filmography

See also

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