The Instant Expert's Guide to: Fritz Lang

Caught in a Viennese Whirl

Moving images were still an inventor's aspiration when Fritz Lang was born in the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on 5 December 1890. His father, Anton, was a construction magnate who had persuaded his Jewish wife, Pauline, to convert to Catholicism before their marriage. Raised in the faith, Lang attended schools chosen to prepare him for a career in architecture. However, he rebelled against his imposed religion and calling by switching courses at the Technical University to study art instead of civil engineering.

Having become embroiled in an art forgery racket, Lang was forced to flee to Munich. However, he failed to settle and, in 1910, he embarked upon an expedition that took him from North Africa and Asia Minor to China, Japan and Bali. On his return, he made for Montmartre, where he fed off the energy of the fin-de-siècle art scene and made a living designing clothes, while also selling watercolours, cartoons and postcards. Just as Lang was putting together his first exhibition, however, the Great War broke out and he liked to tell the tale that he caught the last train out of France in order to return to Vienna and fight for Emperor Franz Josef.

Despite his poor eyesight, Lang was recruited and, while serving with the Imperial Landwehr Field Gun Division No.13, he exposed himself to enemy fire three times between October 1915 and March 1916 in order to report on Russian fortifications in Galicia. Promoted to lieutenant, he was wounded twice in eight days at the battles of Cholopieczy and Zaturcy in June 1916, where he was hit in the eye after his horse was shot from under him. He returned to action after treatment and was involved in minor skirmishes in Romania and earned medals on the Italian front before being hospitalised with nervous exhaustion in the spring of 1918.

A Novice in a Hurry

While convalescing from his wounds and shell shock, Lang started writing to process his thoughts. As neither the Central Powers nor the Allies had recognised cinema's propaganda value, film-making had ground to a halt across Europe in the autumn of 1914, a turn of events that allowed the newly established film colony in Hollywood to seize the global initiative. Yet Lang managed to place his scenario for The Whip, which was directed by Adolf Gärtner in 1916. Little is known about this long-lost outing, but Joe May bought his next offering, The Wedding in the Eccentric Club, and even cast Lang as a priest in Hilda Warren and Death (both 1917). Moreover, Lang made an impression on Erich Pommer, the head of Decla-Bioscop, who had seen him acting in a Red Cross play and invited him to Berlin to join his script department.Much to Lang's frustration, this rattling adventure did such brisk business that Pommer commissioned a sequel, The Spiders: The Diamond Ship. According to Lang's version of events, this meant that he was removed from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (both 1920), an experimental Expressionist horror film scripted by Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz to which Lang had contributed a contentious coda. Robert Weine took over the project, whose influence on silent cinema and the horror genre is covered in Cinema Paradiso's article on 100 Years of German Expressionism.

Full of ideas, Lang wrote seven screenplays in two years at the Babelsberg Studios, with Alwin Neuss and Otto Rippert directing two and three respectively. He also acted as an assistant to Joe May and Joseph Klein on Mistress of the World (1919) before he convinced Pommer to let him have a crack behind the camera. Sadly, neither The Half-Caste nor The Master of Love (both 1919), has survived, while the extant prints of Harakiri (1919) could do with restoration. However, this adaptation of David Belasco's stage play, Madame Butterfly, proved such a surprise commercial success that Pommer afforded Lang the opportunity to make The Spiders: The Golden Sea (1919), which pitted explorer Carl de Vogt and Inca priestess Lil Dagover against a shady criminal syndicate desperate to lay its hands on a treasure map.

During his time at Decla, Lang had sought to master every aspect of the film-making process. He became familiar with lenses and camera mounts to ensure his visuals had texture and fluidity, while he also studied special effects techniques and clamped down on melodramatic acting and improvisation. Sporting a monocle, he gained the reputation for being a tyrannical perfectionist on the set. But his scripts continued to lack psychological depth even after he agreed to team up with Thea von Harbou on The Wandering Image (1920), which Joe May produced for his actress wife, Mia. She co-starred with Von Harbou's husband, Rudolf Klein-Rogge, who soon realised that his wife had fallen for their director.

Von Harbou reunited with Lang on Four Around a Woman before they created their first masterpiece in Destiny (both 1921). Early in adolescence, Lang had been stricken with a serious illness, during which he claimed to have had a vision of Death. 'I saw myself face to face, not terrifying, but unmistakable, with Death,' he later recalled. 'Made of black and white, light and shade, the rib cage, the naked bones...I don't know whether I should call the feeling I experienced at that moment one of fear. It was horror, but without panic...I recovered quickly. But the love of death compounded of horror and affection...stayed with me and became part of my films. 'Played by Bernhard Goetzke, the Grim Reaper intrudes upon the romantic bliss of Lil Dagover and Walter Janssen in a bid to discover whether 'love is stronger than death'. He takes Dagover to Arabia, Venice and China to show her examples of ill-fated passion, but fails to shake her faith. With its structure recalling DW Griffith's Intolerance (1916) and its production design matching that of Ernst Lubitchs's Madame DuBarry (1919) - and, for that matter, any of the other wonderfully varied titles in Eureka's collection - Destiny should have been a hit. But postwar German audiences were alienated by the sombre scenario and it was only after the picture had triumphed in Paris that it was given a fanfared reissue. The American release was delayed, however, as swashbuckling star Douglas Fairbanks had been so impressed by the flying carpet sequence that he bought the US rights, instructed Raoul Walsh to copy the SFX for The Thief of Bagdad (1924) and then premiered Lang's work after his own so that his seemed the more original.

The Kaiser of Babelsberg

Finally afforded a measure of creative latitude, Lang embarked upon a two-part adaptation of Norbert Jacques's novel, Dr Mabuse: The Gambler (1922). Bearing the influence of Louis Feuillade's Fantômas (1913) and Judex (1916), the deeds of a criminal mastermind exploiting the foibles of the rich and powerful caught up in Jazz Age decadence were enacted with relish by Rudolf Klein-Rogge, whose use of disguise and hypnosis makes him so elusive and dangerous in both The Great Gambler: A Picture of the Time and Inferno: A Game for the People of Our Age. Lang was eager for the four-hour picture to document the flaws in the Weimar system and critic Siegfried Kracauer suggested in his epochal study, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947), that the trance-like obedience (or 'kadavergehorsam') shown by Mabuse's acolytes anticipated the behaviour of Adolf Hitler's cohorts.

The Jazz Singer (1927), UFA and Lang found themselves at loggerheads over a sound version of The Woman in the Moon. Convinced the studio was clipping his wings, Lang quit to pursue a project that would reflect the Neue Sachlichkeit or 'New Objectivity' that had pervaded the German art scene. However, Lang retained his faith in the purity of the visual image and some of the most powerful scenes in M (1931) are devoid of dialogue. He took a risk in seeking to understand the motives of child killer Hans Beckert and showed great trust in Hungarian actor Peter Lorre's abilities to make him seem both depraved and desperate. Von Harbour borrowed the kangaroo court concept from Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's musical, The Threepenny Opera, which was also filmed in 1931 by GW Pabst. But Lang was eager to urge a population seemingly sleepwalking its way into tyranny to eschew mob mentality and use their individual judgements.

He had clearly seen a number of Hollywood gangster movies, as he packs proceedings with rat-a-tat dialogue, shootouts and car chases, as commissioner Otto Wernicke tries to confound Klein-Rogge and his malleable medic sidekick, Oscar Beregi. Fritz Arno Wagner's camerawork is stunning and its influence on the visual style of French Poetic Realist and postwar film noir is palpable. But the look and feel of German cinema was about to change and Lang wouldn't work in his adopted homeland for another 26 years.

An Exile in the Wilderness

Never one to resist the temptation of a little self-aggrandisement, Lang always maintained that he packed his belongings and fled by the skin of his teeth on the very day that Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels invited him to become the head of the German film industry. In fact, as Patrick McGilligan established in his matchless biography, Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast (1997), Lang had time to put his affairs in order before making his way to Paris, where Erich Pommer had installed himself as the boss of the Fox Film Corporation's French outpost. But, while Lang was grateful for the chance to make Liliom (1934) from the same Ferenc Molnár play that would inspire Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein's classic musical, Carousel (Henry King, 1956), he knew that his future lay in Hollywood and he readily accepted producer David O. Selznick's invitation to sign for MGM.

Revelling in the media attention he received on docking in New York, Lang took the train for California expecting to be greeted like the visionary who would save American cinema from the ravages of the Great Depression and the artistic torpor that had set in following the dual introduction of sound and the 1934 Production Code. However, Louis B. Mayer was wary of having hired another Erich von Stroheim or Josef Sternberg and he opted to keep Lang on a short leash, with the result that 18 months passed without him directing a single scene. He wasn't short of ideas, however, with his proposed projects including a remake of The Woman in the Moon; Tomorrow, an espionage thriller about a Russian spy battling the sinister Asiatic Committee; The Man Behind You, about a Jekyllesque doctor with a second ego; Hell Afloat, which was based on the fire aboard the SS Morro Castle off the New Jersey coast in 1934; and Passport to Hell, about a politician trying to clear his name of false corruption charges.

During this period of enforced leisure, Lang also passed on Whipsaw and His Brother's Wife, which were made by Sam Wood and WS Van Dyke respectively. Eventually, he agreed to direct Fury (1936), a cautionary tale about mob hysteria starring Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sidney that has pertinent lessons for modern audiences. Credit should be given to screenwriter Bartlett Cormack for developing the Oscar-nominated story that Norman Krasna had based on newspaper headlines. But the clear-sighted exposé of heartland prejudice and discontent owes much to Lang's outsider cynicism and his customary desire to link indivisual human flaws to wider societal malaise.

Similar themes informed You Only Live Once (1937) , an adaptation of Edward Anderson's novel, Thieves Like Us, which Lang made for independent producer Walter Wanger after he ran out of patience with MGM. Referencing the true-life story to which Arthur Penn would return in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), the action follows framed ex-con Henry Fonda after he escapes from prison on the night before his execution and heads towards Mexico with his pregnant wife, Sylvia Sidney. German director Max Nosseck, who had also fled the Nazis, based the bank robbery in Dillinger (1945) on Lang's set-piece, which left a postwar impression on the young François Truffaut. Fonda didn't enjoy the experience, however, and dubbed his director 'a master puppeteer' because of his attempts to impose his will on every gesture and inflection.

Still searching for a base, Lang accepted Paramount's offer to make You and Me (1938) , a little-seen melodrama with songs by Kurt Weil, in which Sylvia Sidney plays a parolee who discovers that husband George Raft and his crooked friends are planning to rob the department store in which they work. However, Lang's working methods again upset the front office and he spent the next two years pitching project like Virginia, about the American tobacco business, and Man Without a Country, a reworking of Spione that was to have featured a female agent working against a syndicate stealing secrets. Indeed, women figured heavily in Lang's thinking, as he worked on a biopic of Napoleon III and the Empress Eugenie; a study of a women running a coal mine; and American Cavalcade, a Capraesque fantasy about a Mid-Western feminist struggling to make the world a better place between the Great War and the Depression.

Doing His Bit

Lang viewed the coming war as an opportunity to rid Europe of Fascism. Yet, while the United States continued to adhere to its Isolationist policy, Hollywood sensed the way the wind was blowing and offered sanctuary to numerous exiles from the conflict. Lang found a home at 20th Century-Fox, where he worked in Technicolor for the first time on The Return of Frank James (1940), a sequel to Henry King's Jesse James (1939), which had teamed Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda. The latter returned to hunt down treacherous killer Robert Ford (John Carradine) and appreciated Lang slowing the pace in order to allow him to explore his character and the morality of circumstances arising from the debasement of the élite and the malleability of the masses in a manner that anticipates the psychological Westerns of the 1950s. Making her screen bow alongside many scene-stealing veterans reprising their roles from the first film, Gene Tierney more than holds her own as a reporter on her father's newspaper and certainly didn't deserve the Harvard Lampoon accolade as 'The Worst Female Discovery of 1940'.

Having taken to such a distinctly American genre so creditably, Lang was entrusted with an adaptation of Zane Grey's Western Union (1941), which paired Robert Young and Randolph Scott on a mission to lay telegraph cable across the Great Plains. Despite being known as a studio perfectionist, Lang discovered that he enjoyed working on location. But he managed to blot his copybook by storming off the set of Moontide (1942), which starred the esteemed French actor Jean Gabin as a bargee with a guilty secret, and he was replaced by Archie Mayo.

Ordinarily, this would have resulted in another spell on the sidelnes. But the studios were no longer refusing to take sides in the war and Lang took little persuading to join forces with Oscar-winning screenwriter Dudley Nichols on Man Hunt (1941) in nailing their colours to the mast in a tense take on Geoffrey Household's novel, Rogue Male. The plot is full of whopping contrivances, as big game hunter Walter Pidgeon is caught stalking Hitler in the grounds of Berchtesgaden and has to flee before sadistic Nazi George Sanders can force him to sign a confession that could be used as a pretext for war. But Lang keeps Arthur C. Miller's camera moving, as the scene shifts to London and Lyme Regis, where Sanders seeks to lure Pidgeon into a trap by kidnapping plucky seamstress Joan Bennett.

Cannily reinforcing the threat posed by Sanders and henchman John Carradine by having them speak in untranslated German, Lang leaves the audience in little doubt that the Third Reich is a dangerous and despicable enemy that must be crushed at all costs and he would restate his case in even more vehement terms in the gripping Hangmen Also Die! (1943), which exposed the crimes of Reiksprotektor Reinhard Heydrich and recalled the same reprisal massacre in the Czech mining village of Lidice that inspired The Silent Village (1943), a deeply moving tribute that can be found on the second volume of the BFI's essential career overview, The Complete Humphrey Jennings Collection: Fires Were Started.

Novelist Graham Greene was scathing about Lang's interpretation of his thriller, Ministry of Fear (1944). Yet he ably conveys the mood of an embattled Britain, as Ray Milland leaves Lembridge Asylum and accidentally becomes embroiled with Fifth Columnists when he wins a cake containing secret information at a village fete being held by the Mothers of Free Nations. Pursued by spies and Scotland Yard for a murder he didn't commit, Milland makes a vulnerable anti-hero. As does Gary Cooper in Cloak and Dagger (1946), which was inspired by Alastair MacBain and Corey Ford's history of the Office of Strategic Services. The action centres on a nuclear physicist's undercover efforts to discover what his Axis counterparts are doing with the radioactive pitchblende being imported from across Europe. Inheriting a part based on Manhattan Project supremo J. Robert Oppenheimer that had been turned down by James Cagney, Coop is solidly supported by special agent Robert Alda, scientists Helene Thimig and Vladimir Sokoloff and partisan Lilli Palmer.

Always willing to rattle cages, Lang stresses the political and moral aspects of the screenplay, which was written by Albert Maltz and Ring Lardner Jr., who, within a year, would become part of the Hollywood Ten who refused to co-operate with the Communist witch-hunt being conducted by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. Unfortunately, as Michael Stuhlbarg demonstrates in Jay Roach's Trumbo (2015), Edward G. Robinson was browbeaten into betraying his principles and his friends. But he was still one of Hollywood's most dependable performers when Lang cast him in The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945), a pair of classic noirs that were produced by Walter Wanger for his actress wife, Joan Bennett.

The latter features in Cinema Paradiso's Top 10 Fritz Lang films below. But the former is fascinating, as it flips the role that Robinson had played in Billy Wilder's prototype noir, Double Indemnity (1944). There, he had been the investigator rumbling the connection between insurance colleague Fred MacMurray and femme fatale Barbara Stanwyck. Here, Robinson plays the lovesick sap who is lured into a web of intrigue by Joan Bennett and attracts the attention of his district attorney buddy, Raymond Massey. Intriguingly, in Secret Beyond the Door (1947), it's the newlywed Bennett who becomes convinced that architect Michael Redgrave has a mysterious past. She suspects loyal secretary Barbara O'Neil of knowing more than she's telling, but Bennett comes to realise that the truth lies inside the room that her often absent husband always keeps locked.

Soon after completing this picture, Lang came under investigation by HUAC and he didn't work again until House By the River (1950), a noir based on an AP Herbert novel that sees novelist Louis Hayward try to pin the murder of his maid on her disabled brother, Lee Bowman, who has feelings for Heyward's wife, Jane Wyatt. The same year also saw Lang make his only combat picture, American Guerilla in the Philippines, an adaptation of an Ira Wolfert novel that had been inspired by the exploits of Ensign Iliff David Richardson, who had established a vital radio outpost on the island of Leyte. The chaos of the Pacific theatre is astutely conveyed in the opening sequences, as Tyrone Power and Tom Ewell try to find ways of outflanking the Japanese and reuniting with General Douglas MacArthur's retreating forces. However, a romantic subplot involving Micheline Presle as a plantation owner's French wife distracts from the rearguard operation that culminates in a tense showdown inside a church.

The 1950s proved to be Lang's most prolific period in Hollywood. Anxious to avoid becoming a jobbing director, he persuaded former lover Marlene Dietrich to headline Rancho Notorious (1952), a rare example of a feminist Western that Lang had devised with occasional collaborator Silvia Richards. Dietrich is on fiery form as saloon singer Altar Keane, whose connection with the Chuck-a-Luck ranch peaks the interest of Wyoming cowboy Vern Haskell (Arthur Kennedy), who is seeking the thieves who had killed his shopkeeping fiancée. However, relations on the set were strained and Lang came to resent the interference of RKO chief, Howard Hughes, and he quit the studio after completing Clash By Night (1952), a reworking of a Clifford Odets play that starred Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Ryan, but which became notorious after nude calendar poses of starlet Marilyn Monroe went public.

Once again under a cloud, Lang made The Blue Gardenia (1953) on a tiny budget in just three weeks. Based on a novella by Vera Caspary, the story turns around Los Angeles switchboard operator Anne Baxter's grim night with calendar artist, Raymond Burr, who winds up dead after making a drunken pass. Reporters fascinated Lang and they dominated the hard-boiled duo of While the City Sleeps and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (both 1956). This would prove to be Lang's last American picture and most critics consider it a guilty pleasure. The same is true of his colourful widescreen take on J. Meade Falkner's gothic melodrama, Moonfleet (1955). But in defending his later years, Lang could always point to the two fine features he made with Glenn Ford at Columbia, The Big Heat (1953) and Human Desire (1954), which reaffirmed his reputation as an innovative visual storyteller with perceptive views on corruption and violence in Cold War America.

Bored with studio politics, Lang agreed to film The Pearl of Love in India. When this ambitious enterprise folded, he returned to West Germany to hook up with producer Artur Brauner, who hoped that Lang would remake some of his silent masterpieces and even suggested a musical reworking of Destiny. But Lang insisted on producing a two-part subcontinental adventure that had been scripted with Von Harbou in the 1920s. The public was underwhelmed by The Tomb of Love and The Tiger of Eschnapur (both 1959), however, and, Lang bowed to pressure to make The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960). He refused to resurrect the criminal mastermind, however, and drew instead on a news story that the Nazis had planned to use surveillance cameras to spy on distinguished guests at the luxurious Hotel Adlon in Berlin. This gave Lang ample opportunity to pack the escapist action with eccentric characters, chic gadgets and copious amounts of sex and violence. In many ways, he anticipated the 007 formula and chillingly posited a world threatened by international terrorism.

Around the turn of the decade, there were rumours of a collaboration with Claude Chabrol. But Lang never worked in film again and went into semi-retirement. Numerous projects were mooted, but, with his sight failing, he spent his final years lapping up the adulation at film schools and festivals around the world before dying in Beverly Hills on 2 August 1976. His critical reputation has undoubtedly diminished over the intervening years, with his tendency to embellish aspects of his personal life hardly helping his cause. But there will never be another Fritz Lang and fanboys and cineastes alike should marvel at his achievement in the face of overwhelming difficulties that would have defeated many a lesser man.