Mabuse the Gambler (1922), Die Nibelungen (1924), 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). ==Life and career== ===Early life=== Lang was born in Vienna, as the second son of Anton Lang (1860–1940), an architect and construction company manager, and his wife Pauline "Paula" Lang ( Schlesinger; 1864–1920).
Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang (December 5, 1890 – August 2, 1976) was an Austrian-German-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor.
He was baptized on December 28, 1890, at the Schottenkirche in Vienna. Lang's parents were of Moravian descent and practising Catholics.
He left Vienna in 1910 in order to see the world, traveling throughout Europe and Africa, and later Asia and the Pacific area.
In 1913, he studied painting in Paris. At the outbreak of World War I, Lang returned to Vienna and volunteered for military service in the Austrian army and fought in Russia and Romania, where he was wounded four times and lost sight in his right eye, the first of many vision issues he would face in his lifetime.
While recovering from his injuries and shell shock in 1916, he wrote some scenarios and ideas for films.
He was discharged from the army with the rank of lieutenant in 1918 and did some acting in the Viennese theater circuit for a short time before being hired as a writer at Decla Film, Erich Pommer's Berlin-based production company.
In 1919, he married for the first time to Lisa Rosenthal, a Jewish girl; in 1921, she died under mysterious circumstances, dying of a single gunshot wound deemed to have been fired by a sidearm weapon from World War I.
In this first phase of his career, Lang alternated between films such as Der Müde Tod ("The Weary Death") and popular thrillers such as Die Spinnen ("The Spiders"), combining popular genres with Expressionist techniques to create an unprecedented synthesis of popular entertainment with art cinema. In 1920, Lang met his future wife, the writer Thea von Harbou.
The German producer Artur Brauner had expressed interest in remaking The Indian Tomb (from an original story by Thea von Harbou, that Lang had developed in the 1920s which had ultimately been directed by Joe May), so Lang returned to Germany to make his "Indian Epic" (consisting of The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb). Following the production, Brauner was preparing for a remake of The Testament of Dr.
In 1919, he married for the first time to Lisa Rosenthal, a Jewish girl; in 1921, she died under mysterious circumstances, dying of a single gunshot wound deemed to have been fired by a sidearm weapon from World War I.
She and Lang co-wrote all of his movies from 1921 through 1933, including 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.
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. Lang was worried about the advent of the Nazi regime, partly because of his Jewish heritage, whereas his wife and co-screenwriter Thea von Harbou had started to sympathize with the Nazis in the early 1930s and, in 1940, joined the NSDAP.
It was a financial flop, as were his last silent films Spies (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.
She and Lang co-wrote all of his movies from 1921 through 1933, including Dr.
Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933, and by March 30, the new regime banned it as an incitement to public disorder.
However, his passport of the time showed that he traveled to and from Germany a few times during 1933. Lang left Berlin for good on July 31, 1933, four months after his meeting with Goebbels and his initial departure.
He moved to Paris, and divorced Thea von Harbou, who stayed behind, late in 1933. In Paris, Lang filmed a version of Ferenc Molnár's Liliom, starring Charles Boyer.
He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1939. 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.
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. Lang was worried about the advent of the Nazi regime, partly because of his Jewish heritage, whereas his wife and co-screenwriter Thea von Harbou had started to sympathize with the Nazis in the early 1930s and, in 1940, joined the NSDAP.
City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s; New York: Harper & Row, 1986; .
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. 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.
Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang (December 5, 1890 – August 2, 1976) was an Austrian-German-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor.
City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s; New York: Harper & Row, 1986; .
"Je les chasserai jusqu'au bout du monde jusqu'à ce qu'ils en crèvent," Paris: Éditions n°1, 1997; . Friedrich, Otto.
Martin's Press, 1997; . Schnauber, Cornelius.
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, film noir in particular.
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