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Portrait of Fritz Lang

Film · European

Fritz Lang

1890–1976 · Austrian-born German, later American

German Expressionism, then Hollywood film noir

Fritz Lang directed the defining monuments of Weimar cinema — a futurist city of workers and machines, and a manhunt for a child murderer that was his first sound film — before leaving Germany in 1934. In Hollywood he became one of the architects of film noir, making taut, fatalistic thrillers about mobs, lynchings and traps. Few directors have a firmer grip on both silent spectacle and hard-edged crime.

How to spot them

  • ▸Geometry: crowds arranged in wedges and triangles, staircases, clocks and machinery
  • ▸The monocle, and a reputation as a tyrant on set
  • ▸Thea von Harbou, his wife and co-writer through the German years
  • ▸Traps: an innocent man cornered, a criminal hunted by other criminals, a society that turns into a mob
  • ▸Played himself, directing a film of the Odyssey, in Godard's Le Mépris

Key films

A city of workers below and pleasure gardens above; a false woman of metal is given a human face, and the machine is seen as Moloch (1927)

Metropolis — the most expensive German silent film ever made; long-lost footage was found in Buenos Aires in 2008

A child murderer in Berlin is betrayed by the tune he whistles and put on trial by the city's own criminals (1931)

M — his first sound film, and Peter Lorre's breakthrough

A silent epic in two parts: a hero bathes in dragon's blood, and his widow takes her revenge at the court of the Huns (1924)

Die Nibelungen (Siegfried and Kriemhild's Revenge)

A rocket flight to the Moon whose launch sequence is credited with inventing the countdown (1929)

Woman in the Moon (Frau im Mond) — Hermann Oberth advised on the rocketry

A criminal mastermind and hypnotist dictates his schemes from an asylum cell; Goebbels banned the film (1933)

The Testament of Dr Mabuse — the last film he made in Germany

An innocent travelling salesman is nearly lynched by an American small-town mob that burns down the jail; the director's first Hollywood film (1936)

Fury, with Spencer Tracy

A middle-aged professor falls for the woman whose portrait hangs in a shop window beside his club (1944)

The Woman in the Window, with Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennett

A detective's wife is killed by a car bomb, and a gangster's girlfriend takes a pot of scalding coffee in the face (1953)

The Big Heat — Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame and Lee Marvin

Key ideas

  • Fate as a machine: his characters are caught in systems — cities, conspiracies, crowds — larger than themselves
  • The mob is as dangerous as the criminal; several films put ordinary society on trial
  • Expressionist design brought into the crime film, and from there into American film noir

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born in Vienna in 1890; he studied art and was wounded several times serving in the Austro-Hungarian army
  • •His wife and co-writer Thea von Harbou wrote the scripts and source novels for Metropolis and M; she joined the Nazi Party and they divorced
  • •He told the story that Goebbels offered him charge of German film production and that he fled the same night — an account historians treat with caution
  • •Metropolis (1927) was restored in 2010 after a near-complete print was found in Buenos Aires
  • •M was his own favourite of his films; he said the whistled theme was performed by Lang himself because Peter Lorre could not whistle
  • •He worked in Hollywood from 1936 to 1956, making Westerns, war films and noirs
  • •He appears as himself, shooting a film of the Odyssey, in Godard's Le Mépris (1963)
  • •He died in Beverly Hills in 1976

Drill it — 8 cards

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Sources