Fritz Lang

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).

His mother was born Jewish and converted to Catholicism.

He had an elder brother, Adolf (1884–1961).

Lang's parents were of Moravian 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.

After finishing school, Lang briefly attended the Technical University of Vienna, where he studied civil engineering and eventually switched to art.

Friedrich Christian Anton Lang (December 5, 1890 – August 2, 1976), better known as Fritz Lang, was an Austrian-US-German film director, screenwriter, and producer who worked in Germany and later the United States.

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.

His father was described as a “lapsed Catholic.” He was baptized on December 28, 1890, at the Schottenkirche in Vienna.

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 Jewish Lisa Rosenthal, who died in 1920 under mysterious circumstances of a single gunshot wound deemed to have been fired by a sidearm weapon from World War I.

Lang's writing stint was brief, as he soon started to work as a director at the German film studio UFA, and later Nero-Film, just as the Expressionist movement was building.

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 second wife, the writer Thea von Harbou.

She and Lang co-wrote all of his movies from 1921 through 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 Die Nibelungen (1924), the dystopian film Metropolis (1927), and the science fiction film Woman in the Moon (1929).

Metropolis went far over budget and nearly destroyed UFA, which was bought by right-wing businessman and politician Alfred Hugenberg.

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).

Lang's most celebrated films include the groundbreaking futuristic science-fiction film Metropolis (1927) and the influential M (1931), a film noir precursor.

It was a financial flop, as were his last silent films Spies (1928) and Woman in the Moon, produced by Lang's own company.

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.

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 later joined the Nazi party in 1940.

After he discovered von Harbou in bed with Ayi Tendulkar, an Indian journalist and student 17 years younger than her, they soon divorced.

Lang's fears would be realized following his departure from Austria, as under the racist Nuremberg Laws he would be identified as half-Jewish even though his mother was a converted Roman Catholic, and he was raised as such.

In 1931, independent producer Seymour Nebenzahl hired Lang to direct M for Nero-Film.

His first "talking" picture, considered by many film scholars to be a masterpiece of the early sound era, M is a disturbing story of a child murderer (Peter Lorre in his first starring role) who is hunted down and brought to rough justice by Berlin's criminal underworld.

At the end of 1932, Lang started filming The Testament of Dr. Mabuse.

Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933, and by March 30, the new regime banned it as an incitement to public disorder.

Testament is sometimes deemed an anti-Nazi film, as Lang had put phrases used by the Nazis 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.

He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1939.

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.

Lang, who was known for being hard to work with, epitomized the stereotype of the tyrannical Germanic film director, a type embodied also by Erich von Stroheim and Otto Preminger; Lang wore a monocle, adding to the stereotype.

In the films of his German period, Lang produced a coherent oeuvre that established the characteristics later attributed to film noir, with its recurring themes of psychological conflict, paranoia, fate and moral ambiguity.