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 to work in Hollywood.
His most famous films are probably the groundbreaking
Metropolis (the world's most expensive silent film at
the time of its release) and M, made before he moved
to the United States.
Early life and career
Born in Vienna, Lang grew up the son of an architect.
Both his father and his mother were practising Roman
Catholics, as was Lang himself; indeed he was baptized
in the Schottenkirche near his family's home. However,
his mother Paula Schlesinger Lang was born Jewish
and was a convert to Catholicism. 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
shell shock he was discharged as lieutenant from the
army.
After the war he joined Germany's
Ufa studio just as the Expressionist movement was
waxing. In this first phase of his career, Lang alternated
between art films such as Der Müde Tod (The Weary
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 (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler)
(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 Mabuse and detective
Von Wenk; Die Nibelungen (1924), and his most famous
film, 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's appointment books,
when they refer to the meeting, mention only the banning
of Testament. No evidence has been discovered in any
of Goebbels's 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
had started to symphathize with the Nazis in the early
1930s and stayed behind. She joined the NSDAP (Nazi
Party) in 1932, leading to a divorce the following
year.
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 and Das
Testament des Dr. Mabuse, Lang directed what many
film scholars consider to be his masterpiece: 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. 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 in
part to the constraints of the 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 Teutonic film director such as Erich
von Stroheim and Otto Preminger; 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 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, which
regarded as a masterpiece by a number of film scholars
today. 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 (The Thousand Eyes
of 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
techniques in Germany as well as the spartan style
already visible in his late American work. 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")
(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)
Spione (Spies) (1928)
Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon) (1929)
M (1931)
Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of Dr.
Mabuse) (1933)
Liliom (1934)
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)
source from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
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