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Friedrich Christian Anton Lang (; December 5, 1890 – August 2, 1976), better known as Fritz Lang (), was an Austrian-born film director, screenwriter, and producer who worked in Germany and later the United States.Obituary Variety, August 4, 1976, p. 63. One of the best-known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute. He has been cited as one of the most influential filmmakers of all time.
Lang's work spans five decades, from the Expressionist silent films of his first German creative period to his short stay in Paris and his work as a Hollywood director to his last three films made in Germany. Lang's most celebrated films include the futuristic science-fiction film Metropolis (1927) and the influential M (1931), a film noir precursor. His 1929 film Woman in the Moon showcased the use of a multi-stage rocket, and also pioneered the concept of a rocket launch pad (a rocket standing upright against a tall building before launch having been slowly rolled into place) and the rocket-launch countdown clock. "The Directors (Fritz Lang)". Sky Arts. Season 1, episode 6. 2018 A gallery of behind-the-scenes shots of movies featuring space travel or aliens. Page 68, photo caption: "Directed by Fritz Lang (third from right), the silent film "Woman in the Moon" (1929) is considered one of the first serious science fiction films and invented the countdown before the launch of a rocket. Many of the basics of space travel were presented to a mass audience for the first time."
His other major films include Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), Die Nibelungen (1924), and after moving to Hollywood in 1934, Fury (1936), You Only Live Once (1937), Hangmen Also Die! (1943), The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945) and The Big Heat (1953). He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1939.
Lang's father was of descent. At one point, he noted that he was "born a Catholic and very puritan". Ultimately describing himself as an atheist, Lang believed that religion was important for teaching ethics. (1998). 9780312194543, St. Martin's Press. ISBN 9780312194543 (2025). 9781447230526, Pan Macmillan. ISBN 9781447230526
After finishing school, Lang briefly attended the Technical University of Vienna, where he studied civil engineering and eventually switched to art. He left Vienna in 1910 to travel throughout Europe and Africa, later Asia and the Pacific area. In 1913, he studied painting in Paris. He was arrested by the French authorities as an "enemy alien," but escaped to Vienna, where he was drafted into the Imperial Austrian Army.
At the outbreak of World War I, Lang lived in the house of his parents in Gars am Kamp (both his parents are buried in Gars) in Lower Austria, where he used to paint. After this he returned to Vienna and volunteered for military service in the Austria-Hungary Army, fighting in Russia and Romania. Lang was wounded four times and lost sight in his right eye, when he then saw a Max Reinhardt show for injured soldiers and played in a Red Cross revue. For a short period of time he was also located in Ljutomer where he stayed with Karol Grossmann where he initially got interested in movies.Smiljanić, Z., 2025. Fritz Lang: Ljutomer - Berlin - Hollywood. 1. izd. izd. Ljutomer; Ljubljana: Kulturno turistično društvo Festival; Založba ZRC.str.144. ISBN 978-961-05-0895-3 During his convalescence he began writing plays and simple scenarios with Austrian film director Joe May devising a two-reel film from a Lang scenario. At the end of the war, Lang began to mingle with the demobilized Berlin artists and was discharged from the army with the rank of lieutenant in 1918. Lang briefly acted in the Viennese theater circuit before being hired as a writer at Decla Film, Erich Pommer's Berlin-based production company.
On 13 February 1919, in the Marriage Registry Office in Charlottenburg, Berlin, Lang married a theater actress named Elisabeth Rosenthal. Rosenthal died of a single gunshot wound in their bathtub on September 25, 1920, the shot deemed to have been fired by Lang's World War I Browning revolver. (2009). 9780813548333, Rutgers University Press. ISBN 9780813548333 Lang and his future wife Harbou claimed that Rosenthal had shot herself, and Lang and Harbou were charged with failure to render aid. The charge was soon dropped.
In 1920, Lang met his future second wife, the writer Thea von Harbou through director Joe May. Harbou co-wrote and directed the film Das wandernde Bild with Lang. She co-wrote every Harbou-Lang film till 1933, including Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler ("Dr. Mabuse the Gambler," 1922 – which ran for over four hours, in two parts in the original version, and was the first in the Dr. Mabuse trilogy), the five-hour (1924), the dystopian film Metropolis (1927), and the science fiction film Woman in the Moon (1929). Metropolis went over budget, to the UFA's detriment. It was a financial flop, as were his last silent films Spione (1928) and Woman in the Moon, produced by Lang's own company.
In 1931, independent producer Seymour Nebenzahl hired Lang to direct M for Nero-Film. His first Talkie, considered by many film scholars to be a masterpiece of the early sound era, M is a story of a child murderer (Peter Lorre in his first starring role) who is hunted down and brought to justice by Berlin's criminal underworld.
Lang was hard to work with. During the climactic final scene in M, Lang allegedly threw Peter Lorre down a flight of stairs in order to give more authenticity to Lorre's battered look.
In the films of his German period, Lang produced an oeuvre that established the characteristics later attributed to film noir, with its recurring themes of psychological conflict, paranoia, fate and moral ambiguity.
Lang started having an affair with the Austrian actress Gerda Maurus during the filming of Spione (1928).
At the end of 1932, Lang started filming The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. As Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933, the new regime banned the film on March 30 as an incitement to public disorder. Testament is occasionally deemed an anti-Nazi film, as Lang had put Nazi phrases into the mouth of the title character. A screening of the film was cancelled by Joseph Goebbels, and it was later banned by the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. In banning the film, Goebbels stated that the film "showed that an extremely dedicated group of people are perfectly capable of overthrowing any state with violence", and that the film posed a threat to public health and safety. (2025). 9780786423378, McFarland. ISBN 9780786423378
Throughout his marriage with Harbou, Lang was known for being a philanderer. Two of his lovers of these years included Gerda Maurus, the leading actress in Lang's last silent films Spione (1928) and Woman in the Moon (1929), and Lily Latte in 1931. In the early 1930s, Harbou started an affair with Ayi Tendulkar, an Indian journalist and student 17 years her junior.
Lang left Berlin permanently on July 31, 1933, four months after his meeting with Goebbels and his initial departure. He moved to Paris,David Kalat, DVD Commentary for The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. New York City, United States: The Criterion Collection (2004) having divorced Thea von Harbou, who stayed behind, earlier in 1933.
In Paris, Lang filmed his only French film, a version of Ferenc Molnár's Liliom, starring Charles Boyer. He then moved to the United States.
Signing first with MGM Studios, Lang's crime drama Fury (1936) saw Spencer Tracy cast as a man who is wrongly accused of a crime and nearly killed when a lynch mob sets fire to the jail where he is awaiting trial. However, in Fury, he was not allowed to represent black victims in a lynching scenario or to criticize racism, which was his original intention. By the time Fury was released, Lang had been involved in the creation of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, working with Otto Katz, a Czech who was a Comintern spy. He made four films with explicitly anti-Nazi themes, Man Hunt (1941), Hangmen Also Die! (1943), Ministry of Fear (1944) and Cloak and Dagger (1946). Man Hunt, wrote Dave Kehr in 2009, "may be the best" of the "many interventionist films produced by the Hollywood studios before Pearl Harbor" as it is "clean and concentrated, elegant and precise, pointed without being preachy."
His American films were often compared unfavorably to his earlier works by contemporary critics, although the restrained Expressionism of these films is now seen as integral to the emergence and evolution of American genre cinema. Scarlet Street (1945), one of his films featuring Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennett, is considered a central film in the film noir genre.
One of Lang's most praised films noir is the police drama The Big Heat (1953), known for its brutality. As Lang's visual style simplified, in part due to the constraints of the Hollywood studio system, 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 (1956).
Following the production, Brauner was preparing for a remake of The Testament of Dr. Mabuse when Lang approached him with the idea of adding a new original film to the series. The result was The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), whose success led to a series of new Mabuse films produced by Brauner (including the remake of The Testament of Dr. Mabuse), though Lang did not direct any of the sequels. Lang was approaching blindness during the production,Robert Bloch. "In Memoriam: Fritz Lang" in Bloch's Out of My Head. Cambridge, MA: NESFA Press, 1986, 171–80 and it was his final project as director.
In 1963, he appeared as himself in Jean-Luc Godard's film Contempt.
Lang died from a stroke on August 2, 1976, and was interred in the Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills Cemetery in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles. Fritz Lang
Lang's American and later German works were championed by the critics of the Cahiers du cinéma, such as François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. Truffaut wrote that Lang, especially in his American career, was greatly underappreciated by "cinema historians and critics" who "deny him any genius when he 'signs' spy movies ... war movies ... or simple thrillers."Dixon, Wheeler Winston (1993). Early Film Criticism of Francois Truffaut. Indiana University Press. pp. 41–42. .
Lang is credited with launching or developing many different genres of film. Philip French of The Observer believed that Lang helped craft the "entertainment war flick" and that his interpretation of the story of Bonnie and Clyde "helped launch the Hollywood film noir". Geoff Andrew of the British Film Institute believed he set the "blueprint for the serial killer movie" through M.
In December 2021, Lang was the subject for BBC Radio 4's In Our Time.
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