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Theatrical Releases Coming to Streaming

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Streaming Stars, Then and Now

Fritz Lang was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1890. His father managed a construction company. His mother, Pauline Schlesinger, was Jewish but converted to Catholicism when Lang was ten. After high school, he enrolled briefly at the Technische Hochschule Wien and then started to train as a painter. From 1910 to 1914, he traveled in Europe, and he would later claim, also in Asia and North Africa. He studied painting in Paris from 1913-14. At the start of World War I, he returned to Vienna, enlisting in the army in January 1915. Severely wounded in June 1916, he wrote some scenarios for films while convalescing. In early 1918, he was sent home shell-shocked and acted briefly in Viennese theater before accepting a job as a writer at Erich Pommer's production company in Berlin, Decla. In Berlin, Lang worked briefly as a writer and then as a director, at Ufa and then for Nero-Film, owned by the American Seymour Nebenzal. In 1920, he began a relationship with actress and writer Thea von Harbou (1889-1954), who wrote with him the scripts for his most celebrated films: Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922), Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924), Metropolis (1927) and M (1931) (credited to von Harbou alone). They married in 1922 and divorced in 1933. In that year, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels offered Lang the job of head of the German Cinema Institute. Lang--who was an anti-Nazi mainly because of his Catholic background--did not accept the position (it was later offered to and accepted by filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl) and, after secretly sending most of his money out of the country, fled Germany to Paris. After about a year in Paris, Lang moved to the United States in mid-1934, initially under contract to MGM. Over the next 20 years, he directed numerous American films. In the 1950s, in part because the film industry was in economic decline and also because of Lang's long-standing reputation for being difficult with, and abusive to, actors, he found it increasingly hard to get work. At the end of the 1950s, he traveled to Germany and made what turned out to be his final three films there, none of which were well received.

In 1964, nearly blind, he was chosen to be president of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival. He was an avid collector of primitive art and habitually wore a monocle, an affectation he picked up during his early days in Vienna. After his divorce from von Harbou, he had relationships with many other women, but from about 1931 to his death in 1976, he was close to Lily Latte, who helped him in many ways.

[about CinemaScope] It&#39;s only good for funerals and snakes.

Each picture has some sort of rhythm which only the director can give
it. He has to be like the captain of a ship.

There was a time when all I looked for was a good story, but nowadays
everything has to look like the size of Mount Rushmore, and the actors
in close-up look as though they belong there.

[on <a class="ipc-md-link ipc-md-link--entity" href="/name/nm0002233/?ref_=nmqu_qu">Erich von Stroheim</a>] In my opinion, there were only two directors in Hollywood who made films without regard to box-office success: Von Stroheim and myself.

[on <a class="ipc-md-link ipc-md-link--entity" href="/name/nm0000064/?ref_=nmqu_qu">Edward G. Robinson</a>] Each part he plays, he enriches with deep and warm understanding of human frailties and compels us to pity rather than condemnation, always adding vivid color to the intricate mosaic of motion picture reality.

In America sex is preached, in France it is done.

[asked in a 1975 interview if he ever met <a class="ipc-md-link ipc-md-link--entity" href="/name/nm0909825/?ref_=nmqu_qu">Raoul Walsh</a>] I never traveled around meeting other directors. I wasn&#39;t haughty in this respect. It is just that all my life I have been so involved in my work that I guess one could say in general that, whenever I had to balance my private life and my profession, my profession always won out.

To begin with I should say that I am a visual person. I experience with my eyes and never, or only rarely, with my ear--to my constant regret.

My private life has nothing to do with my films.

I think any decent human being should run away from home.

[on <a class="ipc-md-link ipc-md-link--entity" href="/name/nm0000017/?ref_=nmqu_qu">Marlene Dietrich</a>] She wears three layers of make-up. One for the stage, one for the street, and one to go to bed with.

Quotes

Fritz Lang

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