The Films of Fritz Lang

Abstract

Although Fritz Lang never fully abandons the allegorical mode, his contemporary films evolve in a different genre, the detective/adventure film. Like science fiction, the detective genre provides fertile ground for allegorical devices, as G. K. Chesterton and others demonstrated, but it also supplies allegory with an alibi, as it absorbs transcendent mystery into a more tangible form of the mysterious. As Kracauer says, ‘the composition of the detective novel transforms an ungraspable life into the translatable analogue of actual reality’. 1 When Lang entered the film industry, according to his own accounts writing scenarios while convalescing from war wounds sustained during World War I, it was the genre of detective and adventure film which originally attracted him. From the beginning of the 1910s or a bit earlier the emerging narrative cinema had embraced the detective and crime film as a genre that provided readymade plot formulas familiar to a mass audience and also challenged filmmakers to develop visual means for telling economic and fast moving stories with a certain degree of complexity. The French first developed detective series with Nick Carter (at Eclair) Nick Winter (Pathé) and Nat Pinkerton (Eclipse), soon followed by films of master criminals, Zigomar, Fantomas, Les Vampires. The Nordisk company in Denmark, a major source for films in Germany before World War I, supplied early Sherlock Holmes films as well as the exploits of the oriental criminal Dr. Gar el Hamma. Shortly before the war, Germany began the extremely intriguing series of girl detective films, Miss Nobody, as well as a number of crime features by directors Franz Hofer and Max Mack. During the war the enormously successful Stuart Webb series was initiated by director Joe May and star Ernst Reichert. According to some sources, one of Lang's first scenarios, Der Peitsche, was sold to the Stuart Webb Detective Company. More certainly, Lang sold one to the detective rival to Webb that Joe May created after breaking with Reichert, Joe Deebs, for a film May directed as Die Hochzeit in Exzentrikklub in 1917.

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