The Directors: Fritz Lang

One can look for some humor while finding more than a little irony in this Austrian-born director's story.  He was famous for films which drew attention to the common man and his fight against bureaucracy and the abuse of power.  And yet he was autocratic and mercurial, stubborn and argumentative, intense and vain and could be downright abusive.   He went nose-to-nose with studio heads and was tossed off movie lots.  Some actors revered him and some detested him.  Fritz Lang, largely forgotten by movie audiences, was a force in his day.

From his early beginnings, he gathered fame for film noir which is how I discovered him after he brought it to America.  The funny thing is that while I didn't know who he was, I didn't know what film noir was either.  I only knew that I was strangely drawn to the darkness and psychology of its themes.  As I caught a few films, I noticed this Fritz guy.  The only Fritz I knew was a neighbor's dog.

It wasn't long after I saw a couple of his films that I heard he was sometimes called the Master of Darkness.  And once I got, really got that, film noir just sort of fell in place for me.  Lang became like the Father of Film Noir in my book.  And just when he and I had gotten kinda niche-y, didn't he just go and do a couple of westerns?   This was my kind of director.  I didn't care that he was considered a pain in the ass, too.  He became one of the first directors whose work I sought out.  (And I was a kid.)

Before he came to America, he was the German-speaking world's most legendary director.  He was known, then and now, as one who helped usher in the German Expressionist movement as he delved into themes that can only be called noir.  His work had a fatalistic pessimism that never left him.

Born in 1890 Vienna, as the son of an architect, Lang would one day put what he had learned about graphic arts in most of his films.  He was the perfect man to give that look to noir. As a youngster he aspired to be an artist and when he could, he ran away to Paris to study and indulge in his painting.  WWI interrupted his first brush with success and Lang the soldier was wounded multiple times, the last of which landed him in an army hospital for a year.

It seems the monocle was an affectation

While convalescing, he tried his hand at writing screenplays and after discharge he did a little acting.  Then he moved to Berlin in 1918 where he worked as an assistant director and story editor.  He began directing in earnest in a short time with one of his special characters, arch criminal, Dr. Mabuse, showing up in a few films over the years.

His first wife Lisa Rosenthal killed herself after she caught him in flagrante delicto with his frequent collaborator Thea von Harbou, whom he then wed.  Shortly after their marriage he traveled to New York and Los Angeles to study American film-making. 

In 1927 he made his most ambitious film to date, Metropolis.  Lang's grand idea, including employing some 37,000 extras,  almost put his studio into bankruptcy.  The plot concerns a futuristic society that has the working class and city planners at odds over its skyscraper-filled city.  Though the film was not a financial success, it is considered a model for science fiction films of the future and became, arguably, Lang's most famous film.

Creepy Peter Lorre in M

His first sound film, M (1931), is another one that sparkled with  great fame on an international scale.  Peter Lorre is chilling as a serial killer of young girls.  Metaphorically it shows the German people's fear of the future and is somewhat of a glimpse into future Nazi power.  This film appears to have influenced the remainder of Lorre's work.  He said that he hated the way Lang treated people.  Lang claimed M as his favorite of all his films. 

As Hitler rose to power he expressed a liking for Lang's films and wanted him to make them for the Reich.  Lang, who was half Jewish but raised as a Catholic, feared for his safety and fled to Paris.  Of course, he wanted von Harbou to leave with him but she was also courted by Hitler for her contribution to German films.  She became a devoted Nazi and soon divorced Lang.

He made one French film with Charles Boyer when famed American producer, David O. Selznick, asked him to come to the states and make movies for him.  In 1934 he arrived in California and sat around the Selznick studios getting more and more frustrated by the moment because the notoriously fussy producer couldn't get his act in gear.  Lang spent countless hours studying up on America and soon became a citizen.  He and Selznick amicably agreed to a parting of the ways without making a single film together.

Fury (1936) became his first American film and it has maintained some of its allure for that very reason.  It is a hardcore look at mobs... the mentality and the violence.  Spencer Tracy stars as a wrongly-convicted prisoner who surprisingly survives a lynching and while presumed dead elects to turn the tables on the mob.  Done in the darkest of ways, Lang, of course, was the perfect one to helm it.  MGM was not the right company (Warners was, however) and they tinkered with the ending, taking away a little of the fury. The studio cut Lang out of the editing and he walked off the lot.

What was this man doing directing westerns?  Why didn't he who loved roaming around a city's nocturnal streets in black and white films chafe under the colorful, blue skies, horses and cowboys?  He would do two in a row.  He would claim he absolutely loved the history of the American west and knew he would one day direct an oater.

With his fellow Nazi-hating pal, Dietrich

20th Century Fox thought he would bring just what they wanted to The Return of Frank James (1940) and Lang eagerly accepted.  Henry Fonda would play the title role, the same one he played opposite Tyrone Power in the previous year's Jesse James.  Frank was not as successful as Jesse but it did fine.  Randolph Scott was there with his western sensibilities and so was a very young Gene Tierney in her film debut.  Fonda loathed Lang and spouted it all over Hollywood.

Scott joined Lang on Western Union (1941) along with Robert Young and Dean Jagger.  It is a gorgeous-looking, apparently well-researched look at the building of the section between Omaha and Salt Lake City.  All three actors delivered the goods.

Lang was having trouble finding a home at a single studio because of his autocratic ways.  He was always rubbing people the wrong way.  He got happier when Fox invited him to direct the film noir, Man Hunt (1941), which includes war espionage, another of the director's familiar subjects.  A war noir was irresistible.  It stars Walter Pidgeon who tries and fails to execute Hitler.  With Nazis in pursuit and a prostitute to run defense for him, it's an exciting thriller.  Joan Bennett began her famous work association with the director, whom she considered a good friend and great director, but he had a serious run-in with studio chieftain Darryl Zanuck and was shown to the front gate.

Woman in the Window (1944) is a nightmarish noir about a befuddled, married college professor who becomes accidentally involved with a woman who is the subject of a painting that has enchanted him.  Edward G. Robinson shows that he is as proficient in weak-guy roles as thugs.  Bennett is as sultry as the part requires and Dan Duryea superb as a slimeball.

All three actors joined the director immediately for Scarlet Street (1945).  Robinson is a milquetoast department store cashier who has taken up painting.  He is so good at it that he is exploited by a couple of cons (Bennett and Duryea) out to do no good.  Seeing Street and Window back-to-back on TCM could put you into a noir coma.

House by the River (1950) never got the acclaim some of Lang's other works did but it's a yummy little noir with second-tier actors Louis Hayward and Jane Wyatt.  It focuses on a deranged writer who murders a maid and after his brother helps him hide the body, the brother becomes the prime suspect.  It was not a friendly set because Lang and Hayward detested one another.

Lang infused as much noir as he could into the colorful western,  Rancho Notorious (1952).  While I certainly enjoyed it, it is kind of a bizarre western mainly due to the presence of Marlene Dietrich as the owner of a ranch for outlaws.  It's not that her acting is bad... it really is simply her presence in a serious western... that accent, that attitude, nutcracker that she is.  To see all those big, bad outlaws kowtowing to a woman is just plain silly... but fun.  While at RKO he and owner Howard Hughes, a business person not unlike Lang, had battles royale.

One of his true buddies, Barbara Stanwyck

One of my favorite Lang flicks is the earthy drama Clash by Night (1952).  We'll forego the assessment because I wrote of it earlier.  Especially noteworthy, however, is how Lang and his high-powered stars  (Paul Douglas, Robert Ryan, Marilyn Monroe) didn't always see eye-to-eye, although Lang and Barbara Stanwyck liked one another.  He, like some of Monroe's future directors, had a fit over her acting coach being on the set and directing her.

The Blue Gardenia (1953) is a finely-plotted little noir where Anne Baxter kills Raymond Burr who is trying to have his clumsy way with her.  The problems increase because she blacks out and doesn't remember doing it.  Ann Sothern as Baxter's roommate apparently wanted to do to Lang what Baxter pretended to do to Burr.

Lang and his cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca developed a new dolly for Blue Gardenia that would revolutionize sustained tracking shots and intimate closeups.

Another great Lang favorite for me is The Big Heat (1953), truly one of the best noirs ever made.  The story has edge-of-your-seat suspense and a thrilling performance from Gloria Grahame.  We reviewed it earlier.

Laying it out for Gloria Grahame and Glenn Ford

It's said that Columbia honcho Harry Cohn rued the day he hired Lang to film Human Desire (1954).  They argued about everything from the title, the location and the actors.  Arrogant control freak meet arrogant control freak.  With this noir, Lang hoped to repeat the phenomenal success he had with The Big Heat, starting with hiring its stars, Grahame and Glenn Ford, both of whom got along with Lang.  The story of a railroad engineer who is having an affair with the wife of a coworker didn't quite equal the success of its predecessor but it's worth a look.

After Human Desire and another ruckus with another studio head, people were getting reluctant to work with the bombastic director. Nonetheless, he signed on at MGM to make the most unusual flick of his career, Moonfleet (1955)... a swashbuckler of sorts.  A young boy is sent by his dying mother to stay with her former lover, a man the boy soon discovers is the leader of a band of outlaws.  Star Stewart Granger said he barely got through making the movie and would never work with Lang again.

Lang's last two American films both starred Dana Andrews and like The Blue Gardenia, dealt with the newspaper business.  Lang had a long-time smug attitude about the press.  The first of these films, While the City Sleeps (1956), the better of the two, is an engrossing crime drama which exposes the unsavory traits of newspaper reporters out to nab a serial killer at any cost.  Andrews got along winningly with Lang because, as he said, if I can get along with Otto Preminger, I can get along with anybody.

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) has Andrews as a novelist who conspires to frame himself as the murderer of a stripper as part of an effort to ban capital punishment.  That doesn't quite cover where this film is headed and while it is suspenseful, it ultimately has so many twists and turns that one wants to blurt out oh, come on.

He probably didn't say to himself that Doubt would be his last American film but he had grown rather pessimistic in his world view and of Hollywood in particular.  He was not in the best of health and was worn out from all the fighting, particularly with the studio bosses and their sycophantic underlings, but he could not or was unwilling to change. 

He worked with American actress Debra Paget (soon at the end of her career) on a couple of related films in India in the late 50s.  He then returned to Germany to make one last installment in his Dr. Mabuse series and he drew the curtain on his directing career.

In 1963 he appeared as himself in Jean-Luc Godard's film, Contempt, and by the following year he was almost completely blind.  In 1971 he married Lily Latte, who had helped him on his films and in his personal life since his last divorce some 38 years earlier.

Fritz Lang died of a stroke in Beverly Hills at age 85 in 1976.  The world had been rather quiet about him for a decade or so but after his death, other directors seemed to overlook the problems he had on film sets and spoke reverently of his films and what he brought to the world of movies.



Next posting:
A thriller from 1962