Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast

Abstract

The name of Fritz Lang - the visionary director of Metropolis, M, Fury, The Big Heat, and thirty other unforgettable motion pictures - is hallowed the world over. But what lurks behind his greatest legends, and his genius as a filmmaker? Was he a closet Nazi in Germany, and later, a virtual Communist in America? Did he really refuse an offer from Hitler to become the Third Reich's "Fuhrer of film" before he fled to the United States in the early 1930s, or was this oft-repeated anecdote the embroidered invention of an ingenious storyteller? Was Lang a sensitive and compassionate artist, as well as a lover of famous women (among them his Berlin compatriot Marlene Dietrich)? Or was he a sado-masochistic beast whose torturous on-set behavior was mirrored, off the job, in a sordid love life crowded with prostitutes and mistresses

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 25 citations exist upstream.