By Patrick McGilligan
St. Martin's. 548 pp. $30
Go to the first chapter of "Fritz Lang"
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The Dark Fantastic
By Robert SklarSunday, June 15, 1997
Was Fritz Lang the greatest director of the movies' first century? He rates consideration for that honor as one of the medium's master stylists, whose tragic vision encompassed human grandeur and folly.
He forged two remarkable careers -- first as a leading light of pre-Hitler Germany's legendary film industry, with works such as "Metropolis" and "M"; then over several Hollywood decades (in a new language and citizenship), with American classics from "Fury" to "The Big Heat." Many film notables have chosen emigration or been forced into exile -- among directors, think of Hitchcock, Bunuel, Wilder, and many more -- but Lang's dual achievement at home and abroad was perhaps unique.
It's unlikely, however, that he would get Patrick McGilligan's vote. With this work McGilligan further strengthens his status as an outstanding film biographer, combining felicitous writing with an expert's command not of celebrity gossip but of cinema history. But more than in previous books (on Jack Nicholson, George Cukor and Robert Altman), his subject here poses the challenge of reaching out to readers who are not buffs or specialists.
Thus the subtitle: The Nature of the Beast. Is McGilligan's Lang a beast in the sense that the Austrian-born director articulated when, in preparing a Hollywood version of Zola's "La Bete Humaine," he said, "Zola wanted to show that in every human being there is a beast"? Or was Lang's beastliness inimitable? It seems the latter.
"Lang makes you want to puke," the author quotes Kurt Weill's 1937 letter to his wife, written while he was working on a score for one of the director's films. "Nobody in the whole world is as important as he imagines himself to be. I completely understand why he is so hated everywhere."
He was hated especially by actors, whom he regarded as puppets and whom he particularly abused. But Lang's beastly nature cast a wide net. He was a toady to superiors, according to McGilligan, and a tyrant to everyone under him (producers were a special category, to whom he was beastly even though they were nominally his bosses). He was notorious for working his film crews long hours and refusing them meal breaks, while he was surreptitiously supplied with coffee, pep pills, and secret snacks.
That's just the everyday Lang. Then there are the major issues. He was, says McGilligan, a mythomaniac, an obsessive publicity hound who created triumphant fables starring himself while relegating troublesome past events to oblivion. Most prominent among the latter was the sensational death of his first wife, who was completely obliterated from all subsequent authorized accounts of his life. In Berlin, in 1920, she discovered Lang and his scriptwriter Thea von Harbou in intimate embrace, then died from a gunshot wound later the same day. The death was ruled a suicide, but Lang-haters darkly suspected his involvement.
Of considerably greater historical significance was Lang's story, which the director began telling during World War II, that in 1933 Goebbels had offered him leadership of the Nazi film industry. He claimed to have fled to Paris on that very day. In recent years scholars have demolished the second part of this tale, having discovered multiple border-crossings stamped in the director's passport, which was deposited after his death in a German archive.
McGilligan's further gloss is that Lang, prominent among Hollywood's anti-fascists, may have demonstrated Nazi sympathies prior to 1933. Von Harbou, for instance, whom Lang married in 1922 and who scripted the director's great films of the 1920s, was a stalwart Nazi and a leading writer-director of Third Reich movies. (They divorced in 1933, after Lang's departure.)
Was Lang blowing hot air with this oft-repeated legend? Goebbels publicly admired "Die Niebelungen" (1924), the director's epic version of the Nordic saga. But he also knew that Lang had Jewish ancestry. Born in 1890 in Vienna to a Catholic father and a Jewish mother, Lang was raised a Catholic, to which religion his mother converted when he was 10. Lang may have suppressed his own knowledge of this background, but others were aware of it in pre-Hitler Berlin, and Lang-haters were not above a touch of anti-Semitism in expressing their disdain for him. McGilligan's treatment of this sensitive subject leaves a gap, to my mind, by reporting every reference to "the Jew" Lang without offering his own considered judgment on what such racial (or racist) typing signifies, when its target is a man baptized in infancy, who always regarded himself as a Catholic.
From so astute a film historian one also wishes some relative ranking of Lang's faults alongside those of the movie world's many other ogres and tale-spinners. And while the author makes insightful analyses of Lang's films, the focus on personal transgressions ultimately precludes full acknowledgment of what the man achieved. Such a beast could never be the greatest.
Robert Sklar teaches cinema studies at New York University and is author of "Film: An International History of the Medium" and other books on film.
© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company
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