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Fritz Lang ________________________
Germany (1890-1976)
Fritz Lang's vision of the world, as expressed in many of his brilliant films, was a dark and hostile one. To him, man was often little more than a puppet in a malevolent universe determined by chaos, degradation, and violence. And the imagery he used, especially in his German films, reflected that worldview: bold, expressionistic, shadowy, sinister. A former painter who drifted into movie work after being mustered out of the Austrian army during World War 1, he wrote scenarios for German-made melodramas and surrealistic serials. Lang first directed in 1919 and, with his third effort, Die Spinnen (The Spiders, a colorful two-part adventure film, achieved considerable notoriety.
Having enjoyed great popular success, Lang went on to achieve critical favor as well with Der müde Tod (U.S. title, Destiny in 1921, which marked his first collaboration with screenwriter Thea von Harbou, who became his wife in 1924. An allegorical tale of love and death, it was the first of many ambitious films they would make together. Dr. Mabuse: der Spieler (1922), like The Spiders a two-part film, saw the earliest successful depiction of Lang's now-familiar nightmare world. Set against the backdrop of a decadent postwar Berlin, it starred Rudolf KleinRogge as a master criminal ultimately driven insane by the vision of his former victims. (Klein-Rogge was a Lang favorite who starred in several of the director's other German films, and reprised his famous role in 1933's The Testament of Dr. Mabuse).
Die Nibelungen (1924) required two feature-length parts--Siegfriedand Kriemhild's Revenge--to dramatize the ancient legend better known through Wagner's "Ring Cycle" operas. Lang's next film galvanized audiences worldwide, and remains his best-known work: Metropolis (1926), a stunning look at a futuristic city and society, which took two years to devise and produce. Although the story is simplistic, its images of faceless workers dwarfed by machines-turned into machines in order to serve the master raceremain powerful and unique after all these years.
He returned to familiar territory with Spies (1928), and made another science-fiction film, Woman in the Moon (1929), before fashioning a full-blown masterpiece, M (1931). The story of a child molester and murderer who is hunted down and tried by the criminal element of his own city, it brilliantly integrated sound and picture, and showcased Peter Lorre's remarkable performance in a film of tremendous suspense and heightened drama.
When Lang's anti-Nazi sentiments became too apparent in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), he ran afoul of Joseph Goebbels and even his own wife, who divorced him. By 1934 Lang was in Paris, directing Liliom (1934), before emigrating to America with a one-picture contract from MGM. Lang's Hollywood debut was the still-impressive mob violence drama Fury (1936). He went on to make a pair of interesting films about society's outcasts, You Only Live Once (1937) and You and Me (1938).
Firmly established in Hollywood, he enjoyed a prolific if varied career through the mid 1950s, excelling at crime melodramas like Man Hunt (1941), Ministry of Fear, The Woman in the Window (both 1944), Scarlet Street (1945), The Blue Gardenia, The Big Heat (both 1953), Human Desire (1954), While the City Sleeps and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (both 1956). If none of them approached the brilliance of his great German films, they were certainly good entertainment and clearly the work of a master craftsman. He even tried his hand at Westerns (1940's The Return of Frank James, 1941's Western Union, 1952's Rancho Notorious. Whether or not Lang could have risen above the level of pulp fiction to the status of an Alfred Hitchcock is matter for speculation; it could be that his fiery personality (which did not endear him to actors) got in the way. Finally tiring of Hollywood and studio pressures, he went back to Germany where, in his twilight years, he returned to the melodramatic stories and characters he created years earlier: The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb (a 1958 two-parter) recalled a 1921 serial Lang and von Harbou had written for director Joe May. (It was edited into the 1962 feature Journey to the Lost City. And his final film, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), took the director back to the character upon which his reputation was originally founded. In 1963 he appeared as himself in Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt.
OTHER FILMS INCLUDE: 1943: Hangmen Also Die 1946: Cloak and Dagger 1948: Secret Beyond the Door 1950: The House by the River, American Guerilla in the Philippines 1952: Clash by Night 1955: Moonfleet. (Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia. Copyright © 1994 Leonard Maltin)
Rome's Metropolis. Very neat graphics and loads of background stuff about the film. Not scholarly, just fun.
Click on the next to last robot face for a list of very good links--to other Lang sites and an excellent site on German Expressionist Cinema.
Grost, Michael, ed. "Metropolis." Classic Film and Television. Good general reading of the film.
"The Balance of Hands, Mind, and Heart: Fritz Lang's Metropolis." Another good reading on the film, focusing on Maria, Freder and Rotwang as "mediators."
Donahue, William Collins. "The Shadow Play of Religion in Fritz Lang's Metropolis." New England Review 24.4 (2004): 207-222. Excellent scholarly article that explains the "cop-out" Christian ending, and reads the film as a humanist manifesto, moreso than as a Christian allegory. Elsaesser, Thomas. "Fritz Lang: The Illusion of Mastery." Sight and Sound. British Film Institute. January 2000. Good overall discussion of his films and career.
PN1998.3 .L36 A5 2003 2003
PN1995.9 .F54 D53 2002 2002
PN1997.M436 F75 2000 C.1 2000
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