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Fritz Lang |
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Director / Screenwriter / Producer |
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1890 - 1976 |
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Born December 5,
Vienna, Austria |
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Key
Production Countries: USA, Germany |
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Key Genres:
Film Noir, Drama, Crime Drama, Thriller, Crime, Police Detective Film, Psychological Thriller, Adventure, Spy Film, Master Criminal Films, Psychological Drama, Melodrama,
Western |
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Key
Collaborators: Thea von Harbou
(Screenwriter), Rudolf Klein-Rogge (Leading Player), Dan Seymour (Character Player),
Karl Vollbrecht (Production
Designer), Otto Hunte (Production Designer), Joan Bennett (Leading Player), Theodor Loos
(Leading Character Player), Fritz Arno Wagner (Cinematographer), Dan Duryea (Leading Character Player), Arthur Hilton (Editor) |
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Highly Recommended: M (1931)*, Fury (1936)*, You
Only Live Once (1937)*, The Woman in the Window (1944)*#, Scarlet Street
(1945)*#, Secret Beyond the Door (1948)#, The House by the River (1950)#, Clash by Night (1952)#, The Big Heat (1953)*#, While the
City Sleeps (1956)*# |
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Recommended:
Destiny (1921)*, Die
Nibelungen (1924)*, Metropolis
(1926)*, Spione (1928)*, Western Union (1941), Ministry of Fear (1944)#, Rancho Notorious (1952),
The Blue Gardenia (1953)#,
Human Desire (1954)#, Moonfleet (1955)*,
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956)*#, The Tiger of Eschnapur (1958)* |
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Worth a Look: Dr.
Mabuse, The Gambler (1922)*, Woman in the Moon (1929), The Testament of
Dr. Mabuse (1933), You and Me (1938), The Return of Frank James (1940),
Man Hunt (1941), Hangmen Also Die (1943), Cloak and Dagger (1946), The
Indian Tomb (1958)*, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960) |
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* Listed in TSPDT's
1,000 Greatest Films
section; #
Listed in TSPDT's
250 Quintessential Noir Films
section. |
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Links:
[
Amazon
] [
IMDB ] [
TCMDB ] [
All-Movie
Guide ] [
Senses
of Cinema: Great Directors ] [
Film Reference ]
[
Wikipedia ] [
British
Film Institute Feature ] [
German-Hollywood Connection Biography ] [
A Fritz Lang
Website ] [
Bright
Lights Film Journal Article ] [
1967
BBC Interview by Alexander Walker ] [
British Film
Institute Feature II ] [
Martin Scorsese on Fritz Lang ] [
Screening the Past Article (2009) ] [
Cinematical: Directors We Love ] [
MovieMaker Interview (1972) ] [
1967 BBC Interview ] [
Classic Film and Television Home Page ]
[
New York Times Article (2011) ] [
Moving Image Source Article (2011)
] |
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Books: [
The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity ] [
TCMDB
] [
Fritz
Lang: The Nature of the Beast ] [
Fritz
Lang ] [
The Films of Fritz Lang: Modernity, Crime and Desire ] [
Fritz
Lang: Photographs and Documents, Vienna-Berlin-Paris-Hollywood ] [
Fritz Lang: Interviews ] [
Fritz Lang's Metropolis: Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear ] [
Fritz Lang: Genre and Representation in His American Films ] [
Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen ] [
The Death of Classical Cinema: Hitchcock, Lang, Minnelli ] |
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"Fritz
Lang's cinema is the cinema of the nightmare, the fable, and the
philosophical dissertation. Lang's apparent weaknesses are the
consequences of his virtues...His characters never develop with
any psychological precision, and his world lacks the details of
verisimilitude that are so important to realistic critics.
However, Lang's vision of the world is profoundly expressed by
his visual forms."
-
Andrew
Sarris (The American Cinema, 1968) |
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"Few
directors can have created so many images of entrapment as did
Lang during his long, distinguished career. Repeatedly, his
protagonists are imprisoned not only by an uncaring society or
by their own flawed nature, but by Destiny itself: Lang's
stories, which regularly return to the theme of crime and
punishment, have the rigorous logic of a philosophical theorem." -
Geoff
Andrew (The Director's Vision, 1999) |
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"Lang's continuing obsession with the psychology of human
weakness made him the ideal thriller and film noir
director, with masterpieces such as The Big Heat (1953),
Clash by Night (1953), and While the City Sleeps
(2956) to his credit." -
Mario Reading (The Movie Companion, 2006) |
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"A world of paranoia, fear and evil fills the work of Fritz
Lang. His early German films (Dr. Mabuse, 22;
Metropolis, 26; M, 31) are subtle, yet striking
illustrations of those preoccupations, while later American
works (Man Hunt, 41; The Big Heat, 53) are more
explosive." -
William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978) |
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"There's
something which you should get out from an actor, something
which is under his skin, something which he himself maybe
doesn't know exactly. I hate - and I never did - to show an
actor how to play a role. I don't want to have twenty-five
little Fritz Lang's running around. I have too much respect for
an actor." -
Fritz
Lang (Directing the Film, 1976) |
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Please
note that the rating given for this director (see top-right) is based
only on the films we have seen (listed above). Films by this director
that we haven't seen include Spiders (1919), Liliom (1934), and American
Guerilla in the Philippines (1950). |
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