Fritz Lang

Film Director

  • Born: December 5, 1890
  • Birthplace: Vienna, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Austria)
  • Died: August 2, 1976
  • Place of death: Los Angeles, California

Austrian-born American film director

Lang was a pioneer in twentieth century filmmaking. The silent films that he directed in Germany in the 1920’s established his reputation as a creative innovator and skilled cinematic craftsman. His sound films in the early 1930’s and Hollywood films of the 1940’s and 1950’s demonstrated his remarkable ability to adapt to changing technical and cultural settings without sacrificing cinematic integrity.

Area of achievement Film

Early Life

Fritz Lang’s father was the municipal architect of Vienna, and Lang followed in his father’s footsteps, studying engineering and architecture at Vienna’s technical university (1908-1910). Though he grew increasingly disenchanted with conventional middle-class life and finally broke with his father and family to study modern art in Munich and Paris, he never lost the architect’s eye for space, light, and alignment.

In the years before World War I, Lang lived a bohemian existence. He traveled to Asia, North Africa, and the South Seas, exotic places that figured occasionally in later films. Even more important for his subsequent development as a director was his immersion in prewar expressionism, a German cultural revolt that challenged most existing standards. Like other youthful artists in this movement, Lang repudiated the urban bourgeois values of his parents’ generation, turning in his case to the orient, the works of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Karl May Westerns, and the occult in search of a new worldview. By 1913, he was back in Paris painting and selling postcards and cartoons.

Interned at the outbreak of World War I, Lang soon escaped and returned to Vienna, where he joined the Austrian army. He rose to the rank of lieutenant during the war and was decorated several times. He was wounded three times, including one injury that left him blind in his right eye. It was during a year of hospitalization at the end of the war that Lang wrote and sold his first screenplays to a leading German filmmaker. While convalescing he also took a small part in a patriotic war play; in the audience was a representative of Berlin’s Decla Film Company, who invited Lang to Berlin as soon as he recovered.

Life’s Work

Lang arrived in Berlin at an opportune moment in early 1919. While most Germans were trying to cope with the chaotic consequences of military defeat and political revolution, the infant German film industry was struggling to satisfy surging public demand for escapist entertainment. It was in this turbulent setting that Lang made his directorial debut in Halbblut (1919), a low-budget thriller about two men destroyed by their love for a half-caste woman. Lang’s early silent films were distinguished by their expressionist stylization, simplification, and exaggeration. Lang’s imaginative use of lighting, fantasy, Freudian symbolism, and oversize corridors, stairways, and doorways reflected the influence of expressionist theater. This style is clearly visible in his first popular film, Der müde Tod (1921; Destiny). Here names such as “the Man” are utilized to universalize characters in the expressionist manner. In Dr. Mabuse der Spieler (1922; Dr. Mabuse the Gambler), Lang’s silent classic about a master criminal out to dominate the world, the young director utilized expressionist sets with painted shadows on the walls. In Metropolis (1927), an overly simplistic study of class and moral conflict in a futuristic city, he introduced stylized workers enslaved to gigantic expressionistic machines. The expressionist element in Lang’s films gave way to greater realism in the late 1920’s, but reminders of this appeared in many later films.

Lang’s silent films were also notable for their extraordinary technical innovation and creativity. Destiny, for example, so impressed Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., that he purchased the American rights to the film to copy its flying carpet scene and other special effects for his 1924 production of The Thief of Bagdad. Die Niebelungen (1924), a two-part epic based on the Siegfried saga, contained an eerie artificial forest guarded by a seventy-foot fire-breathing dragon another cinematic first. Later, in Metropolis, Lang introduced the first “transformation” scene in film history, turning a machine into a lifelike woman. Finally, in his first sound film, the unforgettable classic M (1931), Lang utilized sound creatively to intensify audience anxiety as police and criminals pursue a child murderer. Lang’s fifteen films, all studio-produced in Berlin, created cinematic images that have been copied by film directors ever since.

As one of Universium Film’s foremost directors, Lang enjoyed considerable public and artistic attention. However, like many intellectuals and artists of the time, he displayed little concern for the democratic values indispensable to artistic freedom. Indeed, his films often reflected and reinforced German society’s widespread antidemocratic attitudes. In Die Niebelungen, for example, Lang reinforced traditional German prejudices about Eastern Europe by presenting the Russian Huns as primitive, barbaric people, incapable of organized activity or civilized feelings. Metropolis, Lang’s most expensive and memorable silent film, ends with the calculating factory owner and rebellious, easily manipulated workers united harmoniously by a new leader, a man who seems to foreshadow Adolf Hitler.

Shortly after the Nazi takeover in 1933, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels asked Lang to make films for the Third Reich. Apparently Hitler had been impressed by Lang’s earlier epics. Surprised by this offer but aware that filmmaking in Nazi Germany was changing and that his mother’s Jewish origins might present serious problems, Lang packed what few things he could carry and took the night train that evening to Paris. His wife, Thea von Harbou, with whom he had collaborated on all his scripts since 1920, elected to stay in Nazi Germany and make films for the Third Reich.

In Paris, Lang directed one film, Liliom (1934), before being hired by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s David O. Selznick to make films in Hollywood. Lang’s transition to the United States was not easy. It required not only a change in language and cultural orientation but also subordination to front office decisions, box-office demands, and meddling censors. For a director accustomed to absolute control over every phase of film production, from script selection to crew selection and final editing, Hollywood proved endlessly frustrating.

However, Lang adjusted. He learned colloquial English, became a U.S. citizen in 1935, and slowly won the industry’s respect by making carefully crafted films on time and within budget. His first Hollywood film, the critically acclaimed psychological thriller Fury (1936), probed one of Lang’s favorite themes, mob violence, but this time in a uniquely American setting. Later films explored social issues such as the mistreatment of society’s unfortunate, You Only Live Once (1937), the impossibility of escaping fate, Man Hunt (1941), and the good man misled by the promiscuous woman, The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945). Some of his early American films were deliberately critical of American society, most followed conventional Hollywood themes, but each was stamped with Lang’s unique visual style and exacting attention to detail.

Lang also made three interesting Westerns. In The Return of Frank James (1940), his first color film, this German exile examined humanity’s struggle against frontier injustice. Lang’s favorite was Western Union (1941), a technically accurate but historically fictionalized film about the building of the transcontinental telegraph. His last film in this genre, Rancho Notorious (1952), was memorable for the first use of theme music and for Marlene Dietrich’s sparkling performance. During World War II, Lang directed several anti-Nazi films. They hint at the naked brutality of the Third Reich but do not explain the real character or dangers of National Socialism.

In the 1950’s, the House Committee on Un-American Activities blacklisted Lang for his liberal views and association with leftist exiles such as Bertolt Brecht. He was still able to film a number of detective, or criminal, thrillers, but none was as compelling as his earlier films and several exhibited growing disillusionment with American society. Lang’s favorite American film was the next to last, While the City Sleeps (1956), another story of a frantic manhunt for a pathological killer. He had so much trouble making this film that he decided to retire from Hollywood filmmaking. After returning to West Germany in 1959 to make two mediocre films, Lang retired to the privacy of his comfortable Beverly Hills home, emerging occasionally when declining health permitted him to attend retrospectives honoring his work or to speak with film historians. He died on August 2, 1976.

Significance

Lang was one of the twentieth century’s most creative film directors. A product of pre-1914 expressionism and World War I, he came to film with an aesthetic and intellectual background rarely found among early direction. In forty-two films spanning five decades and two continents, he spawned many firsts in cinematography.

Lang’s German films attracted the greatest popular acclaim. Visually powerful and intellectually provocative, they often focused on the struggle between good and evil, the dark struggle, and they earned for him international recognition long before he moved to Hollywood. That he made the transition to America better than most cultural exiles from Nazi Germany resulted in part from his own talent and resilience and in part from the unique nature of film, which relies more on visual images than on language. It was in the visual dimension of filmmaking that Lang excelled in both Berlin and Hollywood, but he always seemed out of place in Hollywood. His strong German accent, Viennese monocle, and serious approach to making film reminded many of his pre-1933 origins. He may have directed the United States’ most famous stars in his twenty-eight Hollywood films, Spencer Tracy to Joan Bennett and Henry Fonda, but Lang always remained an outsider in the United States. It was this perspective, however, that added a unique touch to his Hollywood films.

Film critics and historians were slow to recognize Lang’s achievements. The political ambiguity in his early German films produced sharp criticism in the 1940’s and 1950’s that clouded his reputation in both the United States and Europe. With the international film revival of the 1960’s, critics began to discover the extent to which this prickly, elusive man had creatively expanded the dimensions of film in both its technical possibilities and psychological power.

Bibliography

Armour, Robert A. Fritz Lang. Boston: Twayne, 1978. This is the best film biography of Lang available. It analyzes Lang’s career and most important German and American films, emphasizing the importance to Lang of the struggle between good and evil.

Bogdanovich, Peter. Fritz Lang in America. New York: Praeger, 1969. Bogdanovich introduces American audiences to the French auteur perspective that looks at the works of an author as a whole. Bogdanovich sees all of Lang’s films as forming a unified whole, united by visual style and thematic continuity.

Eisner, Lotte H. Fritz Lang. Edited by David Robinson, translated by Gertrud Mander. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. A film biography by a friend of Lang, who allowed the director to comment on the book before completion. Provides important personal insights, a brief autobiographical statement by Lang, and a list of unrealized projects.

Gunning, Tom. The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity. London: British Film Institute, 2000. Gunning views Lang’s films as an attempt to cinematically portray a modern world in which systems have replaced individuals.

Jensen, Paul M. The Cinema of Fritz Lang. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1969. This is the first thorough discussion of Lang’s cinema that provides detailed descriptions and analyses of his German and American films. Its focus is more on the cinematic character and innovations than political or public impact of Lang’s films.

Kaplan, E. Ann. Fritz Lang: A Guide to References and Resources. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981. An indispensable reference to writings about Lang and his films to 1980. Contains a brief biographical introduction, valuable discussion of Lang’s changing place in film criticism, detailed information on each of Lang’s films, and a list of archival sources.

McElhaney, Joe. The Death of Classical Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang, Minnelli. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. Examines Lang’s film The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse and others including those of Hitchcock and Lang that were made outside the traditional Hollywood studio system.

Ott, Frederick W. The Films of Fritz Lang. Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1979. Nicely illustrated text based on research in American and German film archives and institutes; includes information from interviews with Lang.

1901-1940: 1920: Premiere of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; 1927: Lang Expands the Limits of Filmmaking with Metropolis.