The Permanent Magic of Fritz Lang

Fritz Lang was born in Vienna in 1890 and died in California in 1976. His life took in service in the First World War, spectacular fame in Germany in the 1920s, escape from the Nazis, and an often difficult period of reinvention in Hollywood. Famous for his autocracy and brutal treatment of actors, he was even dogged with the rumour that he had murdered his first wife. Others, of course, delighted in his company. Either way by the time of his death he was a legend.

His career coincided almost exactly with Alfred Hitchcock's, and the comparison between the two directors is often made. Both thrived in silent film, but easily adjusted to sound. Both moved from Europe to America and recreated their genius in a new culture. Yet while Hitchcock is instantly recognisable and his films are easily seen, Lang's work and reputation are much more obscure. Though no critic would question Lang's stature there's no consensus about which of his films are masterpieces. And substantial scholarly work on Lang is astonishingly scarce. David Thomson, in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, even says that 'Lang's adult stories are too concentrated for today's standards'. But this is too much of a simplification.

Lang was an extraordinarily varied and resourceful director. He was able as much as any other director to turn his hand to virtually all genres. In the 1920s he made large-scale, expansive films, which often tested the limits of the silent cinema. Big-budget, epic, aimed at the mass audience, with the best special effects available at the time, Lang's world in the pre-sound era was peopled by spies, dragons, legendary heroes, dictators, master criminals and futuristic demagogues.

In America, it was difficult to be autonomous, and projects were often dictated by circumstance. But several clusters of work are conspicuous, and show Lang developing ideas over sequences of films. In the late 1930s, several films deal with fugitive and disposessed characters, cast out and scapegoated by society. A trilogy of films from the 1940s starring Joan Bennett are analyses of desire and perversion. And in the 1950s another loose trilogy dwells on the print and television media and their sinister manipulation. Lang directed his last films in Germany, closing the circle of his career.

For all the variety certain themes and preoccupations are constant. Lang seems always to have been interested in what happens to individuals who come up against the larger power of organisations, bureaucracies, criminal networks -- all the modern apparatus of surveillance and control. Almost always these individuals are destroyed by the encounter: they don't find justice even if they have the truth on their side, events always spin beyond their control. If this seems like the world of Kafka, it also belongs to Raymond Chandler. Lang is a mix of artist and pulp storyteller, pessimist and entertainer. As much as any other film director he found how to fuse high and low culture in the new medium of the cinema.

His impact has been formidable. In the 50s, when Cahiers du Cinéma was pioneering serious film appreciation, Lang was in the pantheon along with Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. One of the Cahiers critics, Jean-Luc Godard, went on to cast Lang in Le Mépris (1963) in a blatant act of homage. In the 80s, Metropolis (1927) captured huge new audiences when it was rereleased with a rock soundtrack (Pat Benatar included) produced by Giorgio Moroder; and both Madonna and Queen followed Moroder's lead by referencing Metropolis in pop promos.

The films, many of which have not been seen in England for years, and are showcased in the NFT's major retrospective, are all the more captivating for being so little known and often underestimated. Die Spinnen (1920), Spione (1928) and the first three Mabuse films (Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, Parts 1 and 2, both 1922, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, 1933) are frenetic adventure thrillers: part Raiders of the Lost Ark, part Mission Impossible. Die Nibelungen (1924) and Der müde Tod (1921) are vast mythological fantasies as intricate and sweeping as any films of the silent era. Metropolis is perhaps cinema's greatest science fiction vision, and M (1931) remains the most penetrating study of a serial killer, as compelling as Seven or The Silence of the Lambs.

The American work featured major stars: Henry Fonda, Spencer Tracy, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Bennett, Barbara Stanwyck, Tyrone Power, Edward G. Robinson, and many more. Film noir, westerns, costume drama, thrillers, spy films, films of social protest - Lang made them all. The Big Heat (1953), for example, is perhaps the greatest, and Scarlet Street (1945) probably the most heartbreaking of films noir. No western can compare to Rancho Notorious (1952) for strangeness, and no musical to the avant-garde invention of You and Me (1938), with songs by Kurt Weill. You Only Live Once (1937) starts as a man-on-the-run thriller but ends as an almost biblical parable. Hangmen also Die! (1943) was co-written, and then disowned, by Bertolt Brecht. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) is a taut courtroom drama with an unforgettable twist in the tail.

And this isn't even to mention some of the most rare films: Liliom (1932), Lang's only French film, with its dreamy vision of heaven, or his last work (Der Tiger von Eschnapur, Das indische Grabmal, both 1959, and Die tausend Augen des Dr. Mabuse, 1960), made in India and Germany, the first two in colour, full of amazing reprises of the 20s films...

Lang was a consummate entertainer, a master of every aspect of film-making, and an artist with a serious and coherent purpose. Better, then, not to write him off, but to talk of his 'permanent magic' (in the words of his biographer, Patrick McGilligan), and to marvel at what Tom Gunning, in his new book on Lang, calls 'some of the most precious records of the twentieth century'.

Rob White is editor of the BFI Film Classics. Three books in the series are devoted to Lang films: The Big Sleep, by Colin McArthur; as well asM, by Anton Kaes, and Metropolis, by Thomas Elsaesser. Also forthcoming from BFI Publishing is a major career overview, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision of Modernity, by leading film historian Tom Gunning, published in February 2000 to coincide with the second part of the NFT retrospective when the author visited the NFT to discuss his work.