Fritz Lang

For the German painter, see Fritz Lang (artist).
Fritz Lang

Lang (right) on the set of Woman in the Moon
Born Friedrich Christian Anton Lang
(1890-12-05)December 5, 1890
Vienna, Austria-Hungary
Died August 2, 1976(1976-08-02) (aged 85)
Beverly Hills, California, U.S.
Occupation Film director, film producer
Years active 1919–1960
Spouse(s) Lisa Rosenthal (1919–1921)
Thea von Harbou (1922–1933)
Lily Latté (1971–1976)

Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang (December 5, 1890 – August 2, 1976) was an Austrian-German filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor.[1] One of the best-known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute.[2]

His most famous films include the groundbreaking Metropolis (1927) – which was the world's most expensive film up to that point – and M (1931), a film noir precursor that was made before he moved to the United States.

Life and career

Early life

Lang was born in Vienna as the second son of Anton Lang (1860–1940),[3] an architect and construction company manager, and his wife Pauline "Paula" Lang née Schlesinger (1864–1920). Fritz Lang was baptized on December 28, 1890, at the Schottenkirche in Vienna.[4]

Lang's parents were of Moravian descent and practicing Roman Catholics. His parents (his mother, Jewish born, converted to Roman Catholic) took their religion seriously and were dedicated to raising Fritz as a Catholic. Lang frequently had Catholic-influenced themes in his films.[5][6] Late in life, he described himself as "born Catholic".[7]

After finishing 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.

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 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.

Expressionist films: the Weimar years (1918–1933)

Lang's writing stint was brief, as he 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 films such as Der Müde Tod ("The Weary Death") and popular thrillers such as Die Spinnen ("The Spiders"), 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 all of his movies from 1921 through 1933, including Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse the Gambler; 1922), which ran for over four hours in two parts in the original version and was the first in the Dr. Mabuse trilogy, the five-hour Die Nibelungen (1924), the famous 1927 film Metropolis, the science fiction film Woman in the Moon (1929), and the 1931 classic, M, his first "talking" picture.

Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou in their Berlin flat, 1923 or 1924

Considered by many film scholars to be his masterpiece, M is a disturbing story of a child murderer (Peter Lorre in his first starring role) who is hunted down and brought to rough justice 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.

During the climactic final scene in M, Lang allegedly threw Peter Lorre down a flight of stairs in order to give more authenticity to Lorre's battered look. Lang, who was known for being hard to work with, epitomized the stereotype of the tyrannical German film director, a type embodied also by Erich von Stroheim and Otto Preminger. His wearing a monocle added to the stereotype.

In the films of his German period, Lang produced a coherent oeuvre that established the characteristics later attributed to film noir, with its recurring themes of psychological conflict, paranoia, fate and moral ambiguity.

At the end of 1932, Lang started filming The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933, and by March 30, the new regime banned it as an incitement to public disorder. Testament is sometimes deemed an anti-Nazi film as Lang had put phrases used by the Nazis into the mouth of the title character.

Lang was worried about the advent of the Nazi regime, partly because of his Jewish heritage,[8] whereas his wife and screenwriter Thea von Harbou had started to sympathize with the Nazis in the early 1930s and joined the NSDAP in 1940. They soon divorced. Lang's fears would be realized following his departure from Austria, as under the Nuremberg Laws he would be identified as a Jew even though his mother was a converted Roman Catholic, and he was raised as such.

Emigration

Shortly afterwards, Lang left Germany. According to Lang, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels called Lang to his offices to inform him that The Testament of Dr Mabuse was being banned but that he was nevertheless so impressed by Lang's abilities as a filmmaker (especially Metropolis), he was offering Lang a position as the head of German film studio UFA. Lang had stated that it was during this meeting that he had decided to leave for Paris – but that the banks had closed by the time the meeting was over. Lang has stated that he fled that very evening.[9][10][11]

Lang left Germany in 1934 and moved to Paris[12] after his marriage to Thea von Harbou, who stayed behind, ended in 1933.[13]

In Paris, Lang filmed a version of Ferenc Molnár's Liliom, starring Charles Boyer. This was Lang's only film in French (not counting the French version of Testament). He then went to the United States.[12]

Hollywood career (1936–1957)

In Hollywood, Lang signed first with MGM Studios. His first American film was the crime drama Fury, which starred Spencer Tracy 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. Lang became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1939. He 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. Lang's American films were often compared unfavorably to his earlier works by contemporary critics, but the restrained Expressionism of these films is now seen as integral to the emergence and evolution of American genre cinema, film noir in particular.

One of his most famous films noir is the police drama The Big Heat (1953), noted 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).

Fritz Lang (1969)

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 (a story that Lang had developed in the 1920s which had ultimately been directed by Joe May).[14] So Lang returned to Germany,[15] 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. The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse can be viewed as the marriage between the director's early experiences with expressionist techniques in Germany with the spartan style already visible in his late American work. Lang was approaching blindness during the production,[16] and it was his final project as director. In 1963, he appeared as himself in Jean-Luc Godard's film Contempt.

Death and legacy

While his career had ended without fanfare, his 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."[17] Filmmakers that were influenced by his work include Jacques Rivette and William Friedkin.

Grave of Fritz Lang, at Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills

Lang died in 1976 and was interred in the Forest Lawn – Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles.[18]

Filmography

References

Notes

  1. ↑ Obituary Variety, August 4, 1976, page 63.
  2. ↑ "Fritz Lang: Master of Darkness". British Film Institute. Retrieved January 22, 2009.
  3. ↑ "Architekturzentrum Wien". Architektenlexikon.at. Retrieved March 6, 2010.
  4. ↑ Vienna, Schottenpfarre, baptismal register Tom. 1890, fol. 83.
  5. ↑ Patrick Mcgilligan (1998). Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast. St. Martin's Press. p. 477. ISBN 9780312194543. In the final years of his life, Lang had written, in German, a 20- to 30-page short story called "The Wandering Jew." It was "a kind of fable about a Wandering Jew," according to Pierre Rissient. After Lang's death, Rissient asked Latte [Fritz Lang's third wife] if he might arrange for its publication. "No," she replied, "because Fritz would want to be known as an atheist."
  6. ↑ Tom Gunning, British Film Institute (2000). The films of Fritz Lang: allegories of vision and modernity. British Film Institute. p. 7. ISBN 9780851707426. Lang, however, immediately cautions Prokosh, 'Jerry, don't forget, the gods have not created men, man has created the gods.'
  7. ↑ Lang, Fritz. Fritz Lang: Interviews. p. 163.
  8. ↑ "The religion of director Fritz Lang". Retrieved January 22, 2009.
  9. ↑ Michel Ciment: Fritz Lang, Le meurtre et la loi, Ed. Gallimard, Collection Découvertes, 04/11/2003. The author thinks that this meeting, in fact, never happened.
  10. ↑ Havis, Allan (2008), Cult Films: Taboo and Transgression, University Press of America, Inc., page 10
  11. ↑ Thomson, David (2012) The Big Screen: the story of the movies New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 9780374191894 pages 64-65 Lang's version suspect
  12. 1 2 David Kalat, DVD Commentary for The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. New York City, United States: The Criterion Collection (2004)
  13. ↑ Hughes, Howard (2014). Outer Limits: The Filmgoers' Guide to the Great Science-fiction Films. NY: I.B.Tauris. p. 1. ISBN 1780761651. Retrieved 22 January 2015.
  14. ↑ Plass, Ulrich (Winter 2009). "Dialectic of Regression: Theador W Adorno and Fritz Lang". Telos 149: 131.
  15. ↑ Gold, H. L. (1959-12). "Of All Things". Galaxy. p. 6. Retrieved 15 June 2014. Check date values in: |date= (help)
  16. ↑ Robert Bloch. "In Memoriam: Fritz Lang" in Bloch's Out of My Head. Cambridge MA: NESFA Press, 1986, 171–80
  17. ↑ Dixon, Wheeler Winston (1993). Early Film Criticism of Francois Truffaut. Indiana University Press. pp. 41–42. ISBN 0253113431.
  18. ↑ Krebs, Albin (August 3, 1976). "Fritz Lang, Film Director Noted for 'M,' Dead at 85". New York Times. Retrieved January 22, 2009. Friz Lang, the Viennese-born film director best known for "M", a terrifying study of a child killer, and for other tales of suspense, died yesterday in Los Angeles at the age of 85. He had been ill for some time, and had been inactive professionally for a decade.

Further reading

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