Fritz Lang

1890 - 1976

Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang (December 5, 1890 – August 2, 1976) was an Austrian-German-American film director, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor.[2] One of the best-known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute.[3]

Lang's most celebrated films include the groundbreaking futuristic Metropolis (1927) and the influential M (1931), a film noir precursor that he made before he moved to the United States. His other major films include Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), Die Nibelungen (1924), Fury (1936), You Only Live Once (1937), Hangmen Also Die! (1943), The Woman in the Window(1944), Scarlet Street (1945) and The Big Heat (1953).

Lang was born in Vienna, as the second son of Anton Lang (1860–1940),[7] an architect and construction company manager, and his wife Pauline "Paula" Lang (née Schlesinger; 1864–1920). He was baptized on December 28, 1890, at the Schottenkirche in Vienna.[8] He had an elder brother, Adolf (1884–1961).[9]

Lang's parents were of Moravian descent[10] and practising Catholics. His mother, born Jewish, converted to Roman Catholicism before Fritz's birth, and his parents, who took their religion seriously were dedicated to raising Fritz as a Catholic. Lang frequently had Catholic-influenced themes in his films.[11][12] Late in life, he described himself as "a born Catholic and very puritan".[13] Although an atheist, Lang believed that religion was important for teaching ethics.[14][11][15]

After finishing school, Lang briefly attended the Technical University of Vienna, where he studied civil engineering and eventually switched to art. He left Vienna in 1910 in order to see the world, traveling throughout Europe and Africa, and later Asia and the Pacific area. In 1913, he studied painting in Paris.

At the outbreak of World War I, Lang returned to Vienna and volunteered for military service in the Austrian army and fought in Russia and Romania, where he was wounded four times and lost sight in his right eye,[16] the first of many vision issues he would face in his lifetime. 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 Film, Erich Pommer's Berlin-based production company. In 1919, he married for the first time to Lisa Rosenthal, a Jewish woman; in 1921, she died under mysterious circumstances, of a single gunshot wound deemed to have been fired by a sidearm weapon from World War I.[17][18]

Lang made twenty-three features in his 20-year American career, working in a variety of genres at every major studio in Hollywood, and occasionally producing his films as an independent. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1939.[30]

Signing first with MGM Studios, Lang's crime drama Fury (1936) saw Spencer Tracy cast as a man who is wrongly accused of a crime and nearly killed when a lynch mob sets fire to the jail where he is awaiting trial. However, in Fury, he was not allowed to represent black victims in a lynching scenario or to criticize racism, which was his original intention.[31][32] By the time Fury was released, Lang had been involved in the creation of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, working with Otto Katz, a Czech who was a Comintern spy.[33] He made four films with an explicitly anti-Nazi theme, Man Hunt (1941), Hangmen Also Die! (1943), Ministry of Fear (1944) and Cloak and Dagger (1946). Man Hunt, wrote Dave Kehr in 2009, "may be the best" of the "many interventionist films produced by the Hollywood studios before Pearl Harbor" as it is "clean and concentrated, elegant and precise, pointed without being preachy."[30]

His American films were often compared unfavorably to his earlier works by contemporary critics, although the restrained Expressionism of these films is now seen as integral to the emergence and evolution of American genre cinema, film noir in particular. Scarlet Street (1945), one of his films featuring Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennett, is considered a central film in the genre.

One of Lang's most praised films noir is the police drama The Big Heat (1953), known for its uncompromising brutality, especially for a scene in which Lee Marvin throws scalding coffee on Gloria Grahame's face. As Lang's visual style simplified, in part due to the constraints of the Hollywood studio system, 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 (1956).

Finding it difficult to find congenial production conditions and backers in Hollywood, particularly as his health declined with age, Lang contemplated retirement. The German producer Artur Brauner had expressed interest in remaking The Indian Tomb (from an original story by Thea von Harbou, that Lang had developed in the 1920s which had ultimately been directed by Joe May),[34] so Lang returned to Germany[35] to make his "Indian Epic" (consisting of The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb).

Following the production, Brauner was preparing for a remake of The Testament of Dr. Mabuse when Lang approached him with the idea of adding a new original film to the series. The result was The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), whose success led to a series of new Mabuse films, which were produced by Brauner (including the remake of The Testament of Dr. Mabuse), though Lang did not direct any of the sequels. Lang was approaching blindness during the production,[36] and it was his final project as director. In 1963, he appeared as himself in Jean-Luc Godard's film Contempt. On February 8, 1960, Lang received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his contributions to the motion picture industry, located at 1600 Vine Street.[37][38]

Lang died from a stroke in 1976 and was interred in the Forest Lawn – Hollywood Hills Cemetery in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles.[39][40]. While his career had ended without fanfare, Lang's American and later German works were championed by the critics of the Cahiers du cinéma, such as François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. Truffaut wrote that Lang, especially in his American career, was greatly underappreciated by "cinema historians and critics" who "deny him any genius when he 'signs' spy movies ... war movies ... or simple thrillers."[41] Filmmakers that were influenced by his work include Jacques Rivette, William Friedkin, Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, Luis Buñuel, Osamu Tezuka, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Luc Godard and Stanley Kubrick.[citation needed]

Lang is credited with launching or developing many different genres of film. Phillip French of The Observer believed that Lang helped craft the "entertainment war flick" and that his interpretation of the story of Bonnie and Clyde "helped launch the Hollywood film noir".[42] Geoff Andrew of the British Film Institute believed he set the "blueprint for the serial killer movie" through M.[43]. In December 2021 Lang was the subject for BBC Radio 4's In Our Time.[44]