Fritz Lang, who dreamed of totalitarian cities before waking in one

Fritz Lang

Photo: Wim van Rossem for Anefo / CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 5, 1890 Vienna, Austria
Died	August 2, 1976 (85)
Occupation	Film Director
Known for	Metropolis, M, The Big Heat
Awards	President of the jury, Cannes Film Festival (1964)

The man in the monocle never stopped inventing cities where someone else controls everything. Before the microphone or the marching boot arrived in the same room, Fritz Lang had already built Metropolis’s underground, Dr. Mabuse’s shadow empire, and the criminal city that hunts a child murderer using exactly the logic a police state would later perfect. His German films are the architecture of a world that, in 1927 and 1931, existed only on screen. By 1933, it did not.

He arrived in Vienna in December 1890, the son of a building contractor whose business shaped a man who would spend a career designing impossible structures for the camera. As a young man, Lang set out to be a painter, studied in Paris, traveled through North Africa and claimed southeast Asia — the wandering, expansive years that trained his eye before film gave it somewhere to land. The First World War collected him along with everyone else; a severe injury sent him back from the front to a hospital bed, where he started writing film scenarios instead of letters home.

By 1919 he was in Berlin, writing and then directing at Erich Pommer’s Decla company. The partnership with Thea von Harbou — first as screenwriter, then as wife from 1922 — defined the most productive period of his career. Together they made Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, a two-part epic about a criminal mastermind who bends financial markets and hypnotizes anyone in his way. Then Die Nibelungen, an operatic monument to German myth. Then Metropolis.

Metropolis (1927) was the largest film production Germany had ever attempted: almost 310 shooting days, crowds of extras arranged in formations that prefigure footage from the Nuremberg rallies that would follow six years later. The film imagines a city in the year 2026 — exactly the year we are in now — where workers live underground and the owning class gardens in towers. Its robot woman and its famous image of workers descending into darkness have never stopped feeding the visual imagination of science fiction. Blade Runner, Brazil, and Star Wars are all drawing on what Lang built in a Berlin studio before sound.

Four years later came the film he called his best: M – Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder (1931), the story of a child murderer hunted simultaneously by the police and by the city’s organized criminals, who consider him bad for business. Peter Lorre, in his first major role, plays Hans Beckert — not a monster but something more precise, a man trapped by compulsion whose anguished courtroom self-defense is the film’s most disturbing scene. M invented the psychiatric approach to crime on screen, anticipated the procedural drama by three decades, and demonstrated that a sound film could be as visually dense as any silent. The Nazis tried to block its original title, Murderer Among Us, worrying it referred to them. They were not wrong to worry.

What happened next has been told many times, and the telling has changed with the telling. Lang’s version: in early 1933, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels called him in, informed him his latest Dr. Mabuse film was being banned, and then — apparently immune to irony — offered Lang the directorship of the entire German film industry. Lang says he agreed to consider it, walked out, converted what money he could, and took a night train to Paris. The story is perfect. It is also at least partly invented. Goebbels’ ministerial diary carries no entry for a meeting with Lang on the date in question. Lang’s own passport records show him traveling in and out of Germany throughout 1933. He left permanently on July 31 — four months after the alleged evening. He first told the story a decade later, in 1943, while promoting an anti-Nazi film in Hollywood, and he changed it in each retelling. The actual departure was probably slower, more equivocal, and more expensive emotionally — not least because Thea von Harbou, his wife and co-writer on every great film of the period, had joined the Nazi Party in 1932 and chose to remain.

The American years began with MGM, with months of idleness, and then with Fury (1936) — a film about a man wrongly accused who watches a mob try to burn him alive. It was as if exile had clarified a theme that his German work had approached from the other direction. Fury and You Only Live Once established Lang in Hollywood, but the films he made after the war are where his American reputation solidified: The Big Heat (1953), with its scalding coffee and Glenn Ford’s methodical rage against a corrupt police department, is among the hardest and most economic noirs Hollywood produced. Human Desire followed the next year. Neither asked for sympathy.

He returned to Germany once, in 1958, to make two parts of Der Tiger von Eschnapur and then a final Dr. Mabuse film in 1960. By 1964, nearly blind, he sat as jury president at Cannes — the onetime architect of German Expressionism judging what cinema had become in the sixty years since he first put a monocle to his eye. He died in Beverly Hills on August 2, 1976. Metropolis, the film he set in the year 2026, now arrives at exactly the year Lang imagined, still issuing the same warnings about the same class of people in the same towers, still waiting for someone to read it differently.

Featured Films

Tags: Fury, Peter Lorre, Fritz Lang, m, Metropolis, The Big Heat

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