Fritz Lang

Fritz Lang: The Master of Darkness

On 25 September 1920, Lang's first wife, Elisabeth Rosenthal, died of a gunshot wound in the bathtub of their home. The shot came from Lang's Browning revolver, brought back from the war. Lang and Thea von Harbou — the writer he was already involved with and would later marry — called it suicide; both were charged with failure to render aid, and the charges were quickly dropped. It is the first of several stories about Fritz Lang in which the version he told and the version the record supports do not match. The British Film Institute dubbed him the Master of Darkness. The nickname works on more than one level.

Vienna, and Four Wounds

Lang was born in Vienna on 5 December 1890 to Anton Lang, an architect and construction company manager, and Pauline Schlesinger, who had been born Jewish and converted to Catholicism; he was baptised Catholic at the Schottenkirche that December. He had an older brother, Adolf. He enrolled at the Technical University of Vienna to study civil engineering, switched to art, went to Paris to study painting in 1913, and from 1910 travelled through Europe, Africa, Asia and the Pacific. He volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian Army in the First World War, was wounded four times, lost the sight in his right eye, and was discharged as a lieutenant in 1918. After a brief spell in Viennese theatre he joined Decla Film as a writer and began directing, first at UFA and later at Nero-Film.

Weimar

The German years alternate between Expressionist art films and popular thrillers, and Lang was equally serious about both. He met Thea von Harbou in 1920; she co-wrote everything he made until 1933. *Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler* (1922) was a four-hour crime thriller in two parts and the first of a trilogy. *Die Nibelungen* (1924) ran five hours. *Metropolis* (1927) went far over budget and failed financially, which is now a footnote to its status as the founding image-bank of screen science fiction. *Spies* (1928) also lost money. *Woman in the Moon* (1929) invented, for dramatic purposes, the multi-stage rocket, the rocket launch pad and the countdown clock — conventions that outlived the film and were adopted by the real space age. Then came *M* (1931), his first sound picture, the story of a child murderer, with Peter Lorre in his first starring role. It is regarded as a masterpiece of early sound cinema, and Geoff Andrew of the BFI credits it with setting the blueprint for the serial killer movie. Lang's methods were not gentle: during the climactic scene he is said to have thrown Lorre down a flight of stairs to get an authentically battered look.

The Goebbels Story

Lang's account went like this: *The Testament of Dr. Mabuse* was banned on 30 March 1933 as incitement to public disorder — Goebbels stated that it "showed that an extremely dedicated group of people are perfectly capable of overthrowing any state with violence" — and the propaganda minister summoned Lang, only to offer him the leadership of UFA, so impressed was he by Lang's abilities. Lang said he resolved to flee that same evening for Paris. His passport tells a different story: it records travel to and from Germany throughout 1933, and he left Berlin permanently on 31 July, four months after the meeting he described as decisive. He made one film in France, *Liliom* (1934), from Ferenc Molnár, before going to America. Von Harbou stayed; they divorced in 1933.

Hollywood

He became a US citizen in 1939 and made twenty-two features across the major studios. *Fury* (1936), a lynching drama with Spencer Tracy, arrived with the studio forbidding him to show Black victims or criticise racism directly — a compromise that says more about Hollywood than about Lang. *You Only Live Once* followed in 1937. The war produced a run of anti-Nazi pictures: *Man Hunt* (1941), described as possibly the best interventionist film Hollywood made before Pearl Harbor, then *Hangmen Also Die!* (1943), *Ministry of Fear* (1944) and *Cloak and Dagger* (1946). *The Woman in the Window* (1944) and *Scarlet Street* (1945), the latter with Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennett, are central works of film noir. *The Big Heat* (1953) is a police drama remembered for its brutality. *While the City Sleeps* and *Beyond a Reasonable Doubt* both came in 1956. He returned to Germany for the two-part Indian Epic, *The Tiger of Eschnapur* and *The Indian Tomb*, in 1959, and closed his career with *The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse* in 1960, made as he approached blindness.

The Private Man

Throughout his marriage to von Harbou, Lang was a known philanderer; his lovers included the actress Gerda Maurus, who appeared in *Spies* and *Woman in the Moon*, and Lily Latte, from 1931. Von Harbou began an affair with the Indian journalist Ayi Tendulkar in the early 1930s. Lang described himself as an atheist while holding that religion mattered for teaching ethics: "if you do not teach religion, how can you teach ethics?" It is a revealing formulation from a director whose films are almost entirely about guilt, judgement and whether justice can be administered by human institutions at all.

Why Fritz Is Called a Genius

The faculty is architectural. Lang trained as an engineer and then as a painter, and his gift was for composing a frame the way you would compose a building — sightlines, mass, geometry, the placement of a figure inside a space that is doing the psychological work the dialogue does not. This is craft rather than intellect, and it should be described as craft: the specific skill consists of staging, lighting and cutting so that a viewer feels surveilled, trapped or judged without being told to. He then applied it to material nobody had systematised. *M* built the template for the psychological thriller about a killer; *Metropolis* and *Woman in the Moon* supplied science fiction with its visual grammar and, incidentally, gave the space programme its countdown; *Scarlet Street*, *The Woman in the Window* and *The Big Heat* helped establish film noir's characteristic apparatus of paranoia, fate and moral ambiguity.

The counter-case is worth stating. Much of the German work was co-written by Thea von Harbou, whose contribution the director-centred account tends to shrink. Several of the celebrated films — *Metropolis*, *Spies* — were financial failures whose reputation was retrospectively built, largely by the *Cahiers du cinéma* critics; François Truffaut complained that admirers would "deny him any genius when he 'signs' spy movies... war movies... or simple thrillers," which concedes that the American work was long dismissed. And Lang was a self-mythologiser whose most famous anecdote, the Goebbels summons, is contradicted by his own passport. What survives all of that is the footage. The compositions are as controlled and as legible today as they were a century ago, and directors are still copying them.

Legacy

Lang died of a stroke in Los Angeles on 2 August 1976 and is buried at Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills. His honours included the German Motion Picture Arts Association's Silver Hand for *M* in 1931, the Commander Cross of the Order of Merit in 1957 and 1966, the Golden Ribbon of Motion Picture Arts in 1963, France's Order of Arts and Letters in 1965, a plaque from San Sebastián in 1970, Yugoslavia's Order of the Flag with Golden Wreath in 1971, an honorary professorship of fine arts from the University of Vienna in 1973, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1600 Vine Street, dedicated on 8 February 1960. The Academy Film Archive preserves *Man Hunt* and *Human Desire*.