Spies, 1928
Gerda Maurus and Willy Fritsch
Fritz Lang (1890-1976) was born in Vienna to a Jewish mother, although he was raised as a Catholic. Fritz studied civil engineering in Vienna but soon loved café life and art, especially Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt. For some years he travelled, studying art in Munich and Paris. In 1914 he joined the Austrian army and spent a year in a Vienna army hospital writing screenplays in bed.
In 1919 Lang directed his first movie, Half-Caste. In 1920 he worked for producer Erich Pommer at Decla Biscop Studio, part of the German filmmaking giant UFA. And married screenwriter Thea von Harbou.
German expressionism (post WW1) was a movement characterised by dark shadows, weird angles and distorted identities. Hysteria and deception reflected the complicated German society when the intellectual Weimar Republic also suffered high inflation and unemployment.
Through the 1920s Lang made more ambitious films, including the allegorical melodrama Destiny (1921) and Dr Mabuse The Gambler (1922). In 1924 he first travelled to film companies in New York and Hollywood.
Lang’s first project back in Germany was the futuristic, expensive masterpiece Metropolis (1927), filmed in 1925-6 for UFA. The plot showed a repressive society with exploited workers, lazy rulers and emotionless robots. Lang created his visually detailed films where a camera-process blended shots of miniatures with live action.
After the crime film Spies in 1928, Lang returned to science fiction for the silent Woman in the Moon (1929). The arrival of talkies in late 1929 produced an artistic blossoming of German film, before the collapse of the Weimar Republic in 1933. M (1931) was a German thriller, famous for its revolutionary lighting and horrifying offscreen sound. It was Fritz Lang’s first sound film, starring a chilling Peter Lorre. The murderer terrorised Berlin, but was finally hunted down by Berlin’s criminal underworld. It was Lang’s greatest international success.
Films from UFA, including Lang’s Metropolis and Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel (1930), attracted Hollywood contracts. Even before 1933, Hollywood had invited several German writers, directors and stars to migrate. But when Hitler became chancellor, migration became less ambitious and more survival-focused. After the Reichstag fire, Austrian Jewish director Billy Wilder fled to Paris, and lived in a hotel near Hungarian-Jewish refugee Peter Lorre.
Next was The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933), a crime thriller sequel to Dr Mabuse: The Gambler. The sequel actually was intended as an anti-Nazi statement that equated the German state and Adolph Hitler with criminality. And thus was promptly banned! Lang met Joseph Goebbels in the Ministry of Propaganda, to appeal the ban on The Testament of Dr Mabuse, but failed. Yet Goebbels had seen Lang’s other films, and offered Lang the prestigious Artistic Directorship of UFA. Lang thanked Goebbels, ran home and left Germany that night for Paris. His wife, already a member of the Nazi Party, promptly divorced Lang!
Lang made one film while in France, Liliom (1934), and then accepted David Selznick’s offer to direct a film in Hollywood for MGM. Fury (1936) starred Spencer Tracy, an unforgiving study of mob violence. But it achieved only moderate box-office success.
Fury, 1936
Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sidney
Germany had been the leading centre of the avant-garde in music, art, film and architecture. But the Nazis viewed Weimar culture with reactionary disgust. Their response stemmed partly from conservative aesthetic taste and partly from their determination to use culture as a propaganda tool against the Jews.
Lang, Wilder and other anti-Nazi exiles brought German expressionism with them. Then Lang worked with independent American producer Walter Wanger on the grim You Only Live Once (1937). Based partly on the true Bonnie & Clyde story, it starred Henry Fonda as an ex-convict who was wrongly sentenced to death for murder. He broke out of gaol and fled to Canada with his wife.
The few Hollywood films made before 1941 that supported the US entering WW2 often carried German screen credits. So in Sept 1941, a U.S Senate subcommittee investigated whether Hollywood was campaigning to bring the country into WW2 by inserting pro-British and anti-German messages into films. An isolationist Senator charged Hollywood with producing 20+ pictures in the last year designed to fill Americans with fear that Hitler would invade. Worst still, he noted, many of the studio creatives were Jewish.
Man Hunt, 1941
Walter Pidgeon and Roddy McDowall
Then Man Hunt (1941), based on a thrilling suspense novel. Walter Pidgeon starred in the tense drama as an English hunter in pre-WW2 Germany who could have assassinated Hitler. Lang’s clash with producer Darryl F Zanuck led to the director’s departure from Fox.
Film noir (40s & 50s), the cinema of the disenchanted, grew out of Expressionism. European directors, who’d moved to the US, utilised cynical heroes, stark lighting, frequent flashbacks and intricate plots.
Lang collaborated with Bertolt Brecht on the independent production Hangmen Also Die! (1943), a WW2 film about assassinating SS leader Reinhard Heydrich in Prague. The Woman in the Window (1944) was his most nightmarish drama, starring Edward G Robinson as a married college professor and the woman who was the model in a painting!
Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) was called the quintessential noir, a nasty tale of a murderous affair. Lang’s next project, the gripping Ministry of Fear (1944), featured Ray Milland as a discharged mental patient whose life was endangered by double agents and bogus media. Lang directed a string of unconventional noirs alone, populated not by gangsters and detectives, but by psychologically damaged middle-class losers. Lang then reassembled his Woman in the Window actors to play in Scarlet Street (1945) about a middle-aged amateur artist who became obsessed with a young woman. Otto Preminger, an Austrian Jewish director who reached the USA in 1935, followed with Laura and Fallen Angel (both 1945).
Woman in the Window, 1944
Joan Bennett
But after these triumphs, Lang’s career slumped. Cloak and Dagger (1946) and Secret Beyond the Door (1947) were not successful. The Big Heat (1953) unleashed Glenn Ford as a rogue police officer whose wife was killed by a criminal gang and corrupt city officers. The critics were largely unimpressed, but Lang regarded it as his best.