After Goebbels made him an offer he couldn't refuse without unpleasant repercussions, celebrated German director Fritz Lang fled the new Nazi regime rather than supervise National Socialist Party motion pictures. Lang, a member-in-good-standing of the German Gothic school of Expressionist cinema,...
[more]After Goebbels made him an offer he couldn't refuse without unpleasant repercussions, celebrated German director Fritz Lang fled the new Nazi regime rather than supervise National Socialist Party motion pictures. Lang, a member-in-good-standing of the German Gothic school of Expressionist cinema, cut short a fabulous career to emigrate to America and seek artistic freedom. Each of his films from the 1920s was a visual pearl on a string of success, garnering him critical acclaim as well as a popular following. "Dr. Mabuse the Gambler" (1922), "Die Nibelungen" (1924), "Metropolis" (1926), and "Spies" (1928) are considered four of the finest silent films ever made. Lang even made a graceful transition to sound with "M" (1931), his compelling psychological study of the criminal mind.
Only Nazism brought Lang's brilliant career to a halt: his "The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse" (1933) was banned as anti-Nazi, and the half-Jewish Lang was pressured to make films for the Third Reich. Lang took refuge in Hollywood, where he spent the next 20 years working in a variety of genres, mainly thriller ("Scarlet Street" [1945], "While the City Sleeps" [1956]) and the Western ("The Return of Frank James" [1940], "Rancho Notorious" [1952]). Tired of warring with greedy producers, Lang left the U.S. in the mid-1950s to make a film in India, returning to Germany for his last series of films, including a final chapter in his Dr. Mabuse saga.
Lang's current-day popularity rests almost solely on his portentous special-effects masterpiece, "Metropolis" (1926). The godfather of cinematic science fiction, "Metropolis" is imitated in everything from Flash Gordon's gadgets to Dr. Strangelove's black glove. Reviving the Romantic theme of man-made monster gone berserk, "Metropolis" flew a red flag of warning about the results of willful historical ignorance. The machines that support Metropolis are manned by slaves who live underground and are made to march in lockstep against the backdrop of dishearteningly formidable machinery. Similar architectural symbols of the enslaving power relationships inherent in industrialist culture can be found in all of Lang's films. Both in his Berlin days and later in Hollywood, Lang had a deep infatuation with, as he put it, "Cruelty, fear, horror, and death." As one critic noted, "If Adolf Hitler had never existed, Fritz Lang would have had to invent him on the screen."
His films' eerie sound effects, unrelenting suspense, and narrative economy incorporated Minimalist techniques for enlisting viewers' imagination to evoke horror. A pioneer of the Film Noir genre of the 1940s, Lang was preoccupied throughout his life with the human heart of darkness: vengeance, violence, and the criminal mind. His heroes are brought down by injustice, dark seductresses, or the unbendable laws of a sealed fate. Lang's vision, though richly varied and encompassing many eras and genres, has a consistency of design and a visual power that are unique in world cinema.
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