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Friedrich Anton Christian Lang (December 5, 1890 -
August 2, 1976) was an Austrian film director,
screenwriter and occasional film producer, one of
the best known emigrés from Germany's school of
Expressionism (film)|expressionism to work in
Hollywood. His most famous films are probably the
groundbreaking Metropolis (1927 movie)|Metropolis
(the world's most expensive silent film at the
time of its release) and M (1931 movie)|M, made
before he moved to the United States.


==Early life and career==

Born in Vienna, Lang grew up as the son of an
architect. Both his father and his mother were
Catholics and so was Lang himself; indeed he was
baptized in the Schottenkirche,
Vienna|Schottenkirche near his family's home.
However, unverified speculations circle around his
mother Paula Schlesinger Lang to be of Jewish
ancentry. Lang took up civil engineering at the
Technical University of Vienna but was not
enthusiastic about it and switched studies to art
in 1908. In 1910 and 1911 he left Vienna to see
the world, traveling to Africa and later Asia and
the Pacific area. At the outbreak of the First
World War he was drafted into service in the
Austrian-Hungarian army and fought in World War I,
where he was wounded several times.  After
recovering from injuries and combat stress
reaction|shell shock he was discharged as
lieutenant from the army.

After the war he joined Germany's Universum Film
AG|Ufa studio just as the German
Expressionism|Expressionist movement was waxing.
In this first phase of his career, Lang alternated
between art films such as Der Müde Tod (the
silent death) and populist thrillers such as Die
Spinnen (the spiders) (a two-part film), combining
popular genres with Expressionist techniques to
create an unprecedented synthesis of popular
entertainment with art cinema, culminating in his
most famous silent works: Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler
(1922), a crime epic (running four hours in two
parts in its original version, recently restored
by the Munich Filmmuseum) focusing on the
psychological conflict between the master criminal
Dr. Mabuse|Mabuse and detective Von Wenk; Die
Nibelungen (1924), and his most famous film,
Metropolis (1927 movie)|Metropolis (1927).

==The Goebbels myth==
Many of the stories about Lang's life and career
are hard to verify, including perhaps the most
famous Lang story of all.  The legend has it that
Joseph Goebbels called Lang to his offices for a
meeting in which he gave Lang two pieces of news: 
the first was that his most recent film, Das
Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of Dr.
Mabuse) was being banned as an incitement to
public disorder.  The second was that he was
nevertheless so impressed by Lang's abilities as a
filmmaker, he was offering Lang a position as the
head of German film.  Lang had been, unbeknownst
to Goebbels, already planning to leave Germany for
Paris, but the meeting with Goebbels ran so long
that the banks were closed by the time it
finished, and Lang fled that night without his
money, not to return until after the war.

The problem is that many portions of the story
cannot be checked, and of those that can, most are
contradicted by the evidence.  Lang actually left
Germany with most of his money, unlike most
refugees, and made several return trips later in
the same year.  There were of course no witnesses
to the meeting besides Goebbels and Lang, but
Goebbels' appointment books, when they refer to
the meeting, only refer to the banning of
Testament.  No evidence has been discovered in any
of Goebbels' writings to affirm the suggestion
that he was planning to offer Lang any position. 
Whatever the truth of this legend, it is known
that Lang did in fact leave Germany in 1934 and
moved to Paris and later to the United States. His
wife Thea von Harbou, who had started to
symphatize with the Nazis in the early 1930s and
joined the NSDAP in 1932 which led to a divorce in
1933, remained behind.

==Metropolis, M and his life in America==

Although some consider Lang's work to be simple
melodrama, he produced a coherent oeuvre that
helped to establish the characteristics of film
noir, with its recurring themes of psychological
conflict, paranoia, fate and moral ambiguity. His
work influenced filmmakers as disparate as Jacques
Rivette and William Friedkin. 

In 1931, between Metropolis (1927
movie)|Metropolis and Das Testament des Dr.
Mabuse, Lang directed what many film scholars
consider to be his film noir masterpiece: M (1931
movie)|M, a disturbing story of a child murderer
(Peter Lorre in his first starring role) who is
hunted down and brought to trial by Berlin's
criminal underworld.  M (movie)|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.

Upon his arrival in Hollywood, Lang joined the MGM
studio and directed the impressive crime drama
Fury (1936 movie)|Fury. He became a naturalized
citizen of the United States in 1939.  Lang made
twenty-one features in the next twenty-one years,
working in a variety of genres at every major
studio in Hollywood, occasionally producing his
films as an independent. These films, often
compared unfavourably by contemporary critics to
Lang's earlier works, have since been reevaluated
as being integral to the emergence and evolution
of American genre cinema, film noir in particular.
During this period, his visual style simplified
(owing to the constraints of the less expansive,
more creatively stunted Hollywood studio system)
and 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 (1957).

==Lang as a director==
Lang epitomized the stereotype of the tyrannical
film director such as Alfred Hitchcock or Stanley
Kubrick; he was known for being hard to work with.
During the climactic final scene in M, he
allegedly threw Peter Lorre down a flight of
stairs in order to give more authenticity to
Lorre's battered look. He wore a monocle that
added to the stereotype (though film historians
say this particular cliché began with Erich von
Stroheim), and his image has been parodied in a
number of media, including GWAR's long form video
Phallus in Wonderland.

==Late work and death==
During the 1950s, Lang found it harder to find
congenial production conditions in Hollywood and
his advancing age left him less inclined to
grapple with American backers. The German
producer, Artur Brauner, was expressing interest
in remaking not only The Indian Tomb (a story that
Lang had developed in the twenties that was
ultimately taken from him by studio heads and
directed instead by Joe May) but Lang's earlier
Doctor Mabuse pictures. Fearing that Brauner would
proceed with or without his assent, Lang abandoned
his plans for retirement and returned to Germany
in order to make his Indian Epic. Following the
production, Brauner was ready to proceed with his
remake of Das Testament des Doctor Mabuse when
Lang approached him with the idea of adding
another original film to the series. The result
was Die Tausend Augen des Dr. Mabuse, made in a
hurry and with a relatively small budget. It can
be viewed as the marriage between the director's
early experiences with expressionist and
literalist techniques in Germany as well as his
later instincts fostered by the stifling American
film making climate. It went largely ignored by
critics worldwide. Lang was approaching blindness
during the production making it his final project.


Returning to the United States in retirement, he
continued collecting research material and
drafting screenplays, though he never made another
film. While his career had ended without fanfare,
his work went through a reappraisal in later years
following Jean-Luc Godard's decision to cast him
in his film Le Mépris in addition to
considerable critical adulation in the US from the
likes of Peter Bogdanovich.

He died in 1976 and was interred in the Forest
Lawn - Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles.

==Filmography==

*Halbblut (The Half-Caste) (1919)
*Die Spinnen, 1. Teil: Der Goldene See (Spiders,
Part 1: The Golden Lake)(1919) 
*Harakiri (Madame Butterfly) (1919) 
*Die Pest in Florenz (The Plague in Florence)
(1919) 
*Der Herr der Liebe (Master of Love) (1919) 
*Die Spinnen, 2. Teil: Das Brillantenschiff
(Spiders, Part 2: The Diamond Ship) (1920) 
*Das Wandernde Bild (The Wandering Image) (1920) 
*Der müde Tod (Beyond the Wall) (1921) 
*Vier um die Frau (Four Around a Woman) (1921) 
*Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler)
(1922) 
*Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (Die Nibelungen:
Siegfried) (1924) 
*Die Nibelungen: Kriemhilds Rache (Die Nibelungen:
Kriemheld's Revenge) (1924) 
*Metropolis (1927 movie)|Metropolis (1927) 
*Spione (Spies) (1928) 
*Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon) (1929)
*M (1931 movie)|M (1931) 
*Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of
Dr. Mabuse) (1933) 
*Liliom (1934) 
*Fury (1936 movie)|Fury (1936) 
*You Only Live Once (1937) 
*You and Me (1938) 
*The Return of Frank James (1940) 
*Western Union (1941) 
*Man Hunt (1941) 
*Confirm or Deny (1941) (uncredited)
*Moontide (1942) (uncredited)
*Hangmen Also Die (1943) 
*Ministry of Fear (1944)
*The Woman in the Window (1944)
*Scarlet Street (1945) 
*Cloak and Dagger (1946) 
*Secret Beyond the Door (1948) 
*House by the River (1950) 
*American Guerrilla in the Philippines (1950) 
*Rancho Notorious (1952) 
*Clash by Night (1952) 
*The Blue Gardenia (1953) 
*The Big Heat (1953) 
*Human Desire (1954) 
*Moonfleet (1955) 
*While the City Sleeps (1956) 
*Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1957) 
*Der Tiger von Eschnapur (The Tiger of Eschnapur,
or: The Tiger of Bengal) (1959)
*Das indische Grabmal (The Indian Tomb, or:
Journey to the Lost City) (1959) 
*Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse (The Thousand Eyes
of Dr. Mabuse) (1960)

==See also==
* List of Austrians|List of famous Austrians
* Film noir
* Expressionism
* Metropolis (1927 movie)|Metropolis

==External links==
*imdb name|id=0000485|name=Fritz Lang
* http://www.jscheuer.com/lang.htm Biographie
*
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/0
2/lang.html Senses of Cinema - Biographie
* http://www.persocom.com.br/brasilia/erika.htm
Lang and Metropolis - the first Science Fiction
film

	Web Quotableonline.com Frasescelebres.org Greatbookscollection.org

Friedrich Anton Christian Lang (December 5, 1890 -
August 2, 1976) was an Austrian film director,
screenwriter and occasional film producer, one of
the best known emigrés from Germany's school of
Expressionism (film)|expressionism to work in
Hollywood. His most famous films are probably the
groundbreaking Metropolis (1927 movie)|Metropolis
(the world's most expensive silent film at the
time of its release) and M (1931 movie)|M, made
before he moved to the United States.


==Early life and career==


Born in Vienna, Lang grew up as the son of an
architect. Both his father and his mother were
Catholics and so was Lang himself; indeed he was
baptized in the Schottenkirche,
Vienna|Schottenkirche near his family's home.
However, unverified speculations circle around his
mother Paula Schlesinger Lang to be of Jewish
ancentry. Lang took up civil engineering at the
Technical University of Vienna but was not
enthusiastic about it and switched studies to art
in 1908. In 1910 and 1911 he left Vienna to see
the world, traveling to Africa and later Asia and
the Pacific area. At the outbreak of the First
World War he was drafted into service in the
Austrian-Hungarian army and fought in World War I,
where he was wounded several times.  After
recovering from injuries and combat stress
reaction|shell shock he was discharged as
lieutenant from the army.

After the war he joined Germany's Universum Film
AG|Ufa studio just as the German
Expressionism|Expressionist movement was waxing.
In this first phase of his career, Lang alternated
between art films such as Der Müde Tod (the
silent death) and populist thrillers such as Die
Spinnen (the spiders) (a two-part film), combining
popular genres with Expressionist techniques to
create an unprecedented synthesis of popular
entertainment with art cinema, culminating in his
most famous silent works: Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler
(1922), a crime epic (running four hours in two
parts in its original version, recently restored
by the Munich Filmmuseum) focusing on the
psychological conflict between the master criminal
Dr. Mabuse|Mabuse and detective Von Wenk; Die
Nibelungen (1924), and his most famous film,
Metropolis (1927 movie)|Metropolis (1927).

==The Goebbels myth==
Many of the stories about Lang's life and career
are hard to verify, including perhaps the most
famous Lang story of all.  The legend has it that
Joseph Goebbels called Lang to his offices for a
meeting in which he gave Lang two pieces of news: 
the first was that his most recent film, Das
Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of Dr.
Mabuse) was being banned as an incitement to
public disorder.  The second was that he was
nevertheless so impressed by Lang's abilities as a
filmmaker, he was offering Lang a position as the
head of German film.  Lang had been, unbeknownst
to Goebbels, already planning to leave Germany for
Paris, but the meeting with Goebbels ran so long
that the banks were closed by the time it
finished, and Lang fled that night without his
money, not to return until after the war.

The problem is that many portions of the story
cannot be checked, and of those that can, most are
contradicted by the evidence.  Lang actually left
Germany with most of his money, unlike most
refugees, and made several return trips later in
the same year.  There were of course no witnesses
to the meeting besides Goebbels and Lang, but
Goebbels' appointment books, when they refer to
the meeting, only refer to the banning of
Testament.  No evidence has been discovered in any
of Goebbels' writings to affirm the suggestion
that he was planning to offer Lang any position. 
Whatever the truth of this legend, it is known
that Lang did in fact leave Germany in 1934 and
moved to Paris and later to the United States. His
wife Thea von Harbou, who had started to
symphatize with the Nazis in the early 1930s and
joined the NSDAP in 1932 which led to a divorce in
1933, remained behind.

==Metropolis, M and his life in America==


Although some consider Lang's work to be simple
melodrama, he produced a coherent oeuvre that
helped to establish the characteristics of film
noir, with its recurring themes of psychological
conflict, paranoia, fate and moral ambiguity. His
work influenced filmmakers as disparate as Jacques
Rivette and William Friedkin. 

In 1931, between Metropolis (1927
movie)|Metropolis and Das Testament des Dr.
Mabuse, Lang directed what many film scholars
consider to be his film noir masterpiece: M (1931
movie)|M, a disturbing story of a child murderer
(Peter Lorre in his first starring role) who is
hunted down and brought to trial 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.

Upon his arrival in Hollywood, Lang joined the MGM
studio and directed the impressive crime drama
Fury (1936 movie)|Fury. He became a naturalized
citizen of the United States in 1939.  Lang made
twenty-one features in the next twenty-one years,
working in a variety of genres at every major
studio in Hollywood, occasionally producing his
films as an independent. These films, often
compared unfavourably by contemporary critics to
Lang's earlier works, have since been reevaluated
as being integral to the emergence and evolution
of American genre cinema, film noir in particular.
During this period, his visual style simplified
(owing to the constraints of the less expansive,
more creatively stunted Hollywood studio system)
and 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 (1957).

==Lang as a director==
Lang epitomized the stereotype of the tyrannical
film director such as Alfred Hitchcock or Stanley
Kubrick; he was known for being hard to work with.
During the climactic final scene in M, he
allegedly threw Peter Lorre down a flight of
stairs in order to give more authenticity to
Lorre's battered look. He wore a monocle that
added to the stereotype (though film historians
say this particular cliché began with Erich von
Stroheim), and his image has been parodied in a
number of media, including GWAR's long form video
Phallus in Wonderland.

==Late work and death==
During the 1950s, Lang found it harder to find
congenial production conditions in Hollywood and
his advancing age left him less inclined to
grapple with American backers. The German
producer, Artur Brauner, was expressing interest
in remaking not only The Indian Tomb (a story that
Lang had developed in the twenties that was
ultimately taken from him by studio heads and
directed instead by Joe May) but Lang's earlier
Doctor Mabuse pictures. Fearing that Brauner would
proceed with or without his assent, Lang abandoned
his plans for retirement and returned to Germany
in order to make his Indian Epic. Following the
production, Brauner was ready to proceed with his
remake of Das Testament des Doctor Mabuse when
Lang approached him with the idea of adding
another original film to the series. The result
was Die Tausend Augen des Dr. Mabuse, made in a
hurry and with a relatively small budget. It can
be viewed as the marriage between the director's
early experiences with expressionist and
literalist techniques in Germany as well as his
later instincts fostered by the stifling American
film making climate. It went largely ignored by
critics worldwide. Lang was approaching blindness
during the production making it his final project.


Returning to the United States in retirement, he
continued collecting research material and
drafting screenplays, though he never made another
film. While his career had ended without fanfare,
his work went through a reappraisal in later years
following Jean-Luc Godard's decision to cast him
in his film Le Mépris in addition to considerable
critical adulation in the US from the likes of
Peter Bogdanovich.

He died in 1976 and was interred in the Forest
Lawn - Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles.

==Filmography==

*Halbblut (The Half-Caste) (1919)
*Die Spinnen, 1. Teil: Der Goldene See (Spiders,
Part 1: The Golden Lake)(1919) 
*Harakiri (Madame Butterfly) (1919) 
*Die Pest in Florenz (The Plague in Florence)
(1919) 
*Der Herr der Liebe (Master of Love) (1919) 
*Die Spinnen, 2. Teil: Das Brillantenschiff
(Spiders, Part 2: The Diamond Ship) (1920) 
*Das Wandernde Bild (The Wandering Image) (1920) 
*Der müde Tod (Released in English as Beyond the
Wall; the German title means "weary Death
(personified)|Death") (1921) 
*Vier um die Frau (Four Around a Woman) (1921) 
*Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler)
(1922) 
*Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (Die Nibelungen:
Siegfried) (1924) 
*Die Nibelungen: Kriemhilds Rache (Die Nibelungen:
Kriemheld's Revenge) (1924) 
*Metropolis (1927 movie)|Metropolis (1927) 
*Spione (Spies) (1928) 
*Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon) (1929)
*M (1931 movie)|M (1931) 
*Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of
Dr. Mabuse) (1933) 
*Liliom (1934) 
*Fury (1936 movie)|Fury (1936) 
*You Only Live Once (1937) 
*You and Me (1938) 
*The Return of Frank James (1940) 
*Western Union (1941) 
*Man Hunt (1941) 
*Confirm or Deny (1941) (uncredited)
*Moontide (1942) (uncredited)
*Hangmen Also Die (1943) 
*Ministry of Fear (1944)
*The Woman in the Window (1944)
*Scarlet Street (1945) 
*Cloak and Dagger (1946) 
*Secret Beyond the Door (1948) 
*House by the River (1950) 
*American Guerrilla in the Philippines (1950) 
*Rancho Notorious (1952) 
*Clash by Night (1952) 
*The Blue Gardenia (1953) 
*The Big Heat (1953) 
*Human Desire (1954) 
*Moonfleet (1955) 
*While the City Sleeps (1956) 
*Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1957) 
*Der Tiger von Eschnapur (The Tiger of Eschnapur,
or: The Tiger of Bengal) (1959)
*Das indische Grabmal (The Indian Tomb, or:
Journey to the Lost City) (1959) 
*Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse (The Thousand Eyes
of Dr. Mabuse) (1960)

==See also==
* List of Austrians|List of famous Austrians
* Film noir
* Expressionism
* Metropolis (1927 movie)|Metropolis

==External links==
*imdb name|id=0000485|name=Fritz Lang
* http://www.jscheuer.com/lang.htm Biographie
*
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/0
2/lang.html Senses of Cinema - Biographie
* http://www.persocom.com.br/brasilia/erika.htm
Lang and Metropolis - the first Science Fiction
film