Lang, Fritz b. December 5, 1890;Vienna,Austria d.August 2, 1976; Hollywood, California
Austrian-born, German and U.S. film director, probably the most influential German artist in the twentieth century. With the possible exceptions of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau and Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang remains the only film director who had such an equally successful career in Germany and the United States, having created many film classics on both continents.
In 1913 Lang went to Paris to become a painter, but he had to come back to Austria to serve in World War I. While in the hospital for many weeks in 1916 after being wounded at the front, he began to write stories and scripts, such as the lost manuscript titled Die Peitsche (The Whip, 1916). German director Joe May boughtand directed Lang’s first scripts: Die Hochzeit im Exzentrikklub (The Wedding in the Eccentric Club, 1917) and Hilde Warren und der Tod (Hilde Warren and Death, 1917). That brought Lang to Berlin in 1918, where he directed eight minor movies in just three years. As a film director, Lang began to make his masterpieces from the early 1920s: Der mude Tod (Destiny, 1920), Dr Mabuse, der Spieler (The Crimes of Dr Mabuse, 1922), Siegfried (Die Nibelungen, 1924), Metropolis (Metropolis, 1927) and M (M, 1931).
Lang had the idea of Metropolis (1927) in 1924 while arriving on a boat in New York City with his friend, the producer Erich Pommer, to promote his film Siegfried (1924). The vision of the skyscrapers seen in the sunrise inspired him to write a story about an inhuman, gigantic city of the future. His wife, the novelist Thea von Harbou, wrote a science-fiction novel from this theme and cowrote the script with him in 1925. At that time, it was the most expensive film ever produced in Germany.
Fritz Lang left Germany for France in 1933, after his film Das Testament des Dok- tor Mabuse (The Testament of Doctor Mabuse, 1933), a follow-up to a previous success, had been banned by the Nazi authorities.
After spending a few months in Paris, where he adapted Liliom, a play by Ferenc Molnar, in 1934, Lang left France for the United States, where his films Metropolis (1927) and M (1931) were already known. His debut in Hollywood was not easy, because producers (such as the eccentric David O. Selznick) wanted him to adapt his style to Hollywood’s norms and imagine “happy endings”—something Lang never did before. After many scripts were refused (including the never-filmed Passport to Hell, written in 1935), Lang finally released his first U.S. film, Fury, in 1936, followed by You Only Live Once (1937), and a drama, You and Me (1938). For the next three decades, he shot movies in Hollywood and directed many anti-Nazi films during World War II, among them Man Hunt (1941), Hangmen Also Die (1943, from a script cowritten with Bertolt Brecht), Ministry ofFear (1944), and Cloak and Dagger (1946). Those stunning films confirmed Lang’s position as a master of the American “film noir” genre. Surprisingly, this sophisticated man who spent most of his adult life in Berlin during the 1920s in Hollywood was directing some of the best Westerns ever made by the late 1940s: The Return of Frank James (1940), Western Union (1941), and later Rancho Notorious (1952) with Marlene Dietrich. To explain his fascination for cowboys and Indians, Lang said he was somehow influenced by the Western imagery of German novelist Karl May during his youth. Incidentally, Rancho Notorious was the first Western ever to have a theme song, this one titled “Chuck-a-luck.”In 1950, while Joseph Losey directed a pale remake of Lang’s M in Hollywood, Lang himself went to the Philippines to shoot a war film, American Guerrilla in the Philippines (1950). He also did two remakes of Jean Renoir’s movies: Scarlet Street (1945), from La Chienne; and later Human Desire (1954), from La Bete hu- maine, with which he was not satisfied because of the strict censorship by Hollywood studios for themes related to adultery.
In the midfifties, Lang returned briefly to West Germany, after being summoned before the McCarthy committee in the U.S. Senate. He went to India to shoot a two-part film, a remake from one of the first scripts he wrote with Thea von Har- bou in 1920: The Tiger of Bengal and The Indian Tomb (1959). What became his last film was a fantastic thriller titled The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), shot in West Germany. For Lang, it was the third adaptation of Luxembourg novelist Norbert Jacques’s 1922 story about the mysterious Dr. Mabuse.Yves Laberge
See also Brecht, Bertolt; Dietrich, Marlene Magdalene; Hollywood; Indians in German Literature; Lubitsch, Ernst; May, Karl Friedrich; Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm
References and Further Reading
Bogdanovich, Peter. Fritz Lang in America.
New York: Praeger, 1969.
Elsaesser, Thomas. Metropolis. London: British Film Institute, 2000.
Jacobsen, Wolfgang, Cornelius Schnauber, and Rolf Aurich, eds. Fritz Lang: His Life and Work. Photographs and Documents. Berlin: Jovis Verlags- und Projektburo, 2001.
Laberge, Yves. Metropolis, de Fritz Lang d Giorgio Moroder: le transfert socio-culturel d’une adaptation. PhD thesis. Universite Laval, Quebec City, 1998.
McGilligan, Patrick. Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997.