Fritz Lang's career as a director usefully divides itself into two main periods. The first stretches from 1919 to 1933, during which time he directed eighteen films working within the German film industry. The second begins in 1934, when Lang signed a one-picture deal with David O. Selznick, who at the time was working for MGM. As a director who spent substantial periods making films in both Hollywood and Europe, Lang's career offers an excellent opportunity for a comparative study in consideration of the major differences between these two systems of film-making. Of course the person most able to appreciate these differences was Lang himself, and for this reason this essay uses many quotes from Peter Bogdanovich's book Fritz Lang in America which largely consists of an interview with Fritz Lang taped in 1965, at Lang's then home in California.

To place Lang's career into context, I will begin with a brief summary of his early years. Lang was born in Vienna in 1890, and for a while he was set to follow in his father's footsteps, training as an architect at the Technische Hochschule (Technical High School) in his home town. By the age of twenty though, a career in this area no longer interested him, and he left home and spent a number of years travelling throughout Europe and the East, earning his living as an artist1. The start of the First World War in 1914 saw him return to Austria where he was conscripted into the army, but after sustaining a number of injuries (one of which permanently damaged the sight in his right eye) he was invalided out. During a long recuperation period in an Austrian hospital, he spent some time working out story ideas and had the fortitude to show his work to Joe May, who since 1910 (after initially working as a director) had been running his own production company. May liked Lang's ideas, and produced two of these stories which eventually resulted in the films Hilde Warren und der Tod and Die Hochzeit in Exzentric-Club. To Lang though, the final versions of these films were a long way from his original stories, and so he decided, to avoid similar deviations in the future, he would either have to give up film-making altogether, or become a director himself.

Lang's first major period as a director consequently begins in 1919, in what was one of the capitals for film-making at the time - Germany. The seclusion which Germany as a country suffered throughout the First World War had led to a strengthening of the German film industry, from the point of view of both production and exhibition, in an attempt to provide sufficient entertainment for its people throughout this troubled period. The result was that by the end of the war, the German industry was both extremely large (on a par with Hollywood) and pretty much self-reliant. While there, Lang directed eighteen films over a period of fourteen years, the majority of which are obviously silent. His first major success (both commercially and critically) came with the film Der müde Tod (or as it became known in America - Destiny) in 1921, and there followed a period during which time each new project of Lang's was a major event, eagerly anticipated by all quarters. Seemingly in an attempt to live up to this hype, the films he made throughout this period increased accordingly in scale with the massive, expensive, and highly ambitious likes of Die Nibelungen 1. Teil: Siegfried in 1924 and, perhaps most famously, Metropolis in 1926. His success in Germany by this point had also led to him gaining recognition in many other countries throughout Europe. In 1924, the spiral of post-war inflation had been brought under control by Germany's acceptance of the Dawes plan, but since this prevented exportation, the German film industry began to suffer as production companies found it increasing difficult to find investors. Hollywood took hold of this opportunity by flooding the market with its own product, further weakening the German industry. Even the size of the Ufa studios could not prevent it from suffering, and by 1925 it was on the verge of bankruptcy, in no small part due to the increasingly large budgets of Lang's recent films. With the poor state of the German film industry, it is debatable how long Lang would have continued to make films there, but in effect his hand was forced when Hitler and the Nazi party assumed complete political control in 1933. After being offered the position of head of the German film industry by Goebbels, Lang, being half-Jewish, 'agreed to everything' before fleeing to Paris the very same day, leaving behind all his possessions, his money, and his wife.

The result was that after a brief sojourn in France, where he made one film - Liliom, which starred Charles Boyer - Lang arrived, as part of the large exodus of German talent, in Hollywood, the year 1934 marking the beginning of his second major period of directing. Although his salary was far in excess of what he had been used to, it was perhaps not as high as might be expected given his past reputation: 'Hitchcock, even when a contract director at Warner Bros, was making $250,000 per film whereas Lang's usual fee was $50,000, a pittance by studio standards and embarrassingly little compared with the leading actors in most of his films.'2 The main appeal to Lang though was the increased audience which Hollywood's strong distribution networks throughout the world would ensure:

People talk about box office, but the producer or the financier goes to the box office to find out if he's getting his money back, if he's going to make a profit or not. I go to the box office too, and I am happy when a picture does big business, but it means something different to me. It means I have reached many, many more people with my ideas - I have reached the big audience I was aiming at!3

In this twenty-two year period in Hollywood he produced a further twenty films, before he was once again forced to move on by what he felt was a similarly dictatorial presence - the control which the major studios exerted over film production in America.

For this essay, I have decided to concentrate mainly on Lang's first American film - Fury, which was released in 1936 - as I feel the changes and alterations made to this film throughout its production are a good representation of the differences which Lang experienced in attempting to direct films for an American audience, coming almost directly from Germany, and arriving in a new country with only the most basic knowledge of the language and culture.

In the first place, it will noticeable from the dates I have given previously that there was a gap of around a year-and-a-half between the time Lang first signed a contract with MGM, and the release of Fury. As would be expected, to some degree this was a period of acclimatisation, and Lang spent much time travelling around the country, trying to: 'speak with everybody. I spoke with every cab driver, every gas station attendant - and I looked at films.'4 This was in effort to experience what he called the: 'American atmosphere.'5 On top of this travelling though, he did also spent a significant amount of time trying to develop a new project which would mark his entry into the American market, but everything he started failed to come to fruition. A few examples of projects he spent time working on during this period are - The Man Behind You, The Journey, Tell No Tales and Hell Afloat (which was rejected by Selznick). From this it is clear that the initial factor in the decision by MGM to sign Lang, as in keeping with Hollywood's attitude to all European talent, was simply a desire to own him - in effect preventing him from making films elsewhere, and consequently by robbing all other countries of their best talent weakening the potential resistance to Hollywood's domination of cinema screens throughout the world. Even Hollywood has a limit to its resources however, and after a year of Lang being on the payroll with no product to show for it, he was called in front of studio executive Eddie Mannix and informed that he was on the verge of being kicked out. His last chance was developing a four-page outline, written by Norman Krasna, and called Fury.

The route taken to being assigned his first project was Lang's first experience of the difficulty of getting a film financed in America, even if you are working for a studio. While the choice of becoming a director may have been a sensible move in order to gain a greater degree of control in the auteur led industry of Europe, there is no doubt in the Hollywood in which Lang arrived, the power and control over how the film would finally reach the audience lay solely with the producers, Lang himself saying: 'When you are under contract to a major American studio, you have no complete control.'6 In a similar move to his previous one, Lang attempted to rectify this situation and gain greater control (as so many other directors have done) by setting up a production company of his own, which was named Diana Productions7, with Universal acting as their distributor. Again, as is so often the case, lacking the resources of the major studios, Lang's move into production was not as successful as his previous move into directing had been, and in the end his company only produced two films - Scarlet Street and Secret Beyond the Door.

In his German films Lang had consistently had superhuman characters acting as central protagonists. Of course this is most obviously apparent in his adaptation of the Teutonic legend Die Nibelungen - its story set in a world populated by Norse gods, with at its centre (at least during the first part), Siegfried, a virtually invincible warrior, who does not know what fear is. But there are also plenty of examples which can be drawn from his other films of this period, one being the godlike controller of the city Joh (or John) Fredersen in Metropolis; another the omnipresent (and death defying) criminal Dr. Mabuse in the series of films which Lang made based on this character.

In the first draft of the screenplay to Fury, which Lang had co-written along with Bartlett Cormack (though the majority of the actual dialogue was by Cormack because of Lang's rudimentary knowledge of English at this point), this trend in characterisation was carried over to a certain degree for the role of the central figure, which was eventually to be filled by Spencer Tracy. In the first draft, this character was a lawyer, who, while not quite supermen, are certainly from the upper echelons of society, as Lang felt that a character from this class could: 'better express his feelings and thoughts than a working man, a labourer.'8 However, after showing this initial draft to a producer at MGM, the problem with this attitude when making American films was immediately pointed out, the producer declaring (as described by Lang):

'No, this is absolutely impossible.' I said, 'Why?' And that was the first time I heard the words, Joe Doe [sic], Jane Doe. He explained to me something I should have known by then, because it's exactly what I forgot to tell you about comic strips9: everything there happens to Joe Doe - meaning you and me - not to some upper-class man. And he explained to me that in an American picture one would have to have Joe Doe - a man of the people - as a hero.10

This difference in attitude undoubtedly stems from the differences between the two cultures, and Lang himself cites this as a factor:

In Germany, under the influence of military power I'm not speaking of Hitler, but even before, under the military power of the emperor - (there is a phrase you cannot even translate, Kadaver gehorsam, which means even your cadaver must obey, absolute obedience) - so because of that influence, and Nietzsche's, the hero in Germany was always a superman.11

By contrast, in a country founded upon the principles of freedom, equality and democracy, it becomes a necessity to depict heroes as ordinary - the Everyman, who the audience can directly relate with, as indeed Spencer Tracy's character had become by the final version of the script. Of course, any notion of 'ordinary' or 'average' is purely hypothetical, as clearly there is no such thing (a lawyer may have related more with the character in the first draft than in its eventual form), but Hollywood prefers the percentages, and so provides characters who they believe the majority of the audience can relate to.

A similar pointer to the difference between the two countries, is the use of symbols within Lang's films. A scene from Fury shows a number of women gossiping:

Lang's original idea had been to cut from this scene to a shot of chattering geese, in imitation of the women. These geese are clearly not part of the filmic world, and consequently the juxtaposition created imposes a reading onto the behaviour of the women which is fairly easy for the audience to pick up. This idea probably seemed a perfectly natural thing for Lang to do - his German films up to that point having been rife with symbols of this kind - this being typical of European cinema in general. An example from Metropolis is the machine which has a clock face superimposed over it to show how slowly the ten-hour shifts pass for the workers:

Another is the blossoming tree which dissolves into the image of a skull, clearly foretelling the fate of the lovers - Seigfreid and Kriemheld - in the first part of Die Nibelungen.

By contrast, symbols of this kind are rare in Lang's American films, but also American films in general. There are two main reasons why this is the case, the first of which is the fact that it disrupts the reality of the setting created, breaking the audiences suspension of disbelief which is so vital to Hollywood if it is to successfully tell its narratives. Of course this suspension of disbelief is only that, as it comes about from the audience experiencing a series of familiar codes and conventions, but it means that it can be broken if, for example, symbols are used which disrupt this continuity. In the example mentioned, the non-diegetic (i.e. not part of the film world) nature of the shot of geese breaks the continuity of the setting which has been established. In Europe, with cinema regarded more as an art form (rather than simply a medium through which a story is told), this self-referential highlighting of the medium becomes in a sense desirable in itself, and hence is much more common.

The second reason can be considered as a difference between the German and American cultures, which Lang himself describes as a 'question of education' and a producer at MGM, in less diplomatic terms, as: 'American people don't like symbols. They're not so dumb that they don't understand without them.'12 Although this may seem like one of the few instances when an American producer was being unpatronising in his attitude towards the audience, clearly it once again comes down to question of conventions - what people are used to. The result of all this was that Lang had dropped the idea of including the geese by the final cut of the film, although, as with the issues mentioned above to do with characterisation, he agreed that this was the correct thing to do for the audience he was trying to address.

With capitalism being at the very centre of the American culture, it is perhaps not surprising that films are treated as simply another product, and that the Hollywood studios operate a production-line mentality in churning out their goods. An example which highlights this (as well as the relative status of directors in the Hollywood of this period) is the film Confirm or Deny (1941) which Lang had begun to direct as a contract job for 20th Century-Fox. After his doctor had advised him to take eight days rest after a mild gall bladder attack, he was immediately replaced by Archie Fox who completed the film: 'a picture didn't exist in those days where a director could take eight days off'13.

In contrast to this, Lang had come from a relatively slack regime in Germany where: 'you could come to the studio in the morning and sit there are say, "What shall I do today?"'14 with large-scale projects such as Metropolis commonly being in production for more than a year15. Lang himself admitted: 'the pressure went up in Hollywood (and in a certain way rightly so)'16. The tighter shooting schedules imposed by the Hollywood studios (typically around a month), meant that Lang was forced to do a greater amount of pre-production work (and work away from the set during production), meaning that by the first day of shooting he generally had a complete script with detailed camera setups, making shooting simply the process of capturing on film what had already been planned.

This extensive planning before and during production had a significant effect on the type of films Lang produced while in Hollywood - they all can be described as very tightly structured works which tell their stories in an efficient fashion. A simple measure of this can be considered as running time - all Lang's American films coming in around the hour-and-a-half mark. In comparison to this, by the end of his German period he was producing sprawling epics such as: Die Nibelungen, running 186 minutes; Frau im Mond, running 156 minutes; and Metropolis which was cut down to ten reels on its American release (approx. 120 minutes), from the original seventeen, meaning large sections of the story were omitted (and have now been lost). Consequently it is noticeable that the German films are most often remembered for their visual excellence (particularly for the time they were made) rather than for their stories which are often long-winded and highly convoluted. By contrast, his American films can be regarded as exactly the opposite, with more functional visuals (though Lang always retained his individualistic visual style) and easily accessible stories.

In a sense this is typical of the difference between the two systems. In Europe, where films are under the control of auteurs, the primary factor is that this person manages to get their vision or message on screen. The accessibility of this to a general audience is at the very least a secondary issue, or even possibly a non-issue. Of course occasionally a film manages to cross over into the mainstream, a recent example being Life is Beautiful (1998). In Hollywood, the primary factor is a consideration of how the audience will react to the film. A good example of this is a story Lang tells of the time he was called to attend a screening of a new film (not one of his own) by the head of Columbia pictures, Harry Cohn:

Picture is over, lights, everybody sits there motionless. You don't hear a sound. Harry Cohn gets up, walks to the screen - not saying a word ... Suddenly he turned around and said, 'This is a very good picture.' Great sigh from the whole audience. 'But ...' Everybody stops breathing. ... 'But,' he said, 'it is exactly nineteen minutes too long.' ... finally [the writer] said, 'Excuse me, Mr Cohn, why do you say "exactly nineteen minutes?" Why don't you say half-an-hour, quarter-of-an-hour, twenty minutes, about or around? And Harry Cohn looked at him - he is very quiet - and says, 'Young man, exactly nineteen minutes ago my ass started to itch and right there I know the audience would feel the same thing.' And he was right! The moment an audience starts to itch around, you know you have lost them. There is an unwritten law - it is something you have to feel - how long you can stress a scene, a situation, how long can the tension be held?17

Clearly the audience is uppermost in consideration, although this is of course not an exact science, as each individual has his or her own tastes. But this time it is the directors vision or message which becomes the secondary issue, although of course again there are times when directors are successful in getting this across under the studio system. An example of a compromise which Lang had to make in this area was with Fury: 'let me make something clear. If a picture is to be made about lynching, one should have a white woman raped by a coloured man, and with this as the basis, still prove that lynching is wrong. Not make a lynching picture about a kidnapping that never happened, about an innocent man.'18 Clearly this was too sensitive an issue for the studios to tackle at that time (Louis B. Mayer, vice president of MGM from 1924 to 1951, allegedly said 'Coloured people can only be used as shoeshine people or as porters in a railroad car.'19), as Hollywood's ultimate doctrine is not 'to entertain', but rather 'not to offend'. Despite his initial wishes being thwarted, as has been mentioned, the more enterprising directors were able to get important messages across, and Lang: 'went to libraries and tried to inform myself, and I saw the possibility of saying something against lynching - even if it was not as it should be done.'20

For many people the ending of the film, with Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sidney kissing after Tracy's character has been proved innocent in the trial, is forced making it, in Pauline Kael's words, a: 'tacky ending, which doesn't jibe with Lang's sensibility and style.'21 As may be expected this was not a choice of Lang's, but was demanded by the studio. Unsurprisingly, Lang: 'hated the kiss, because I think it wasn't necessary. A man gives a speech that ... is very well written and extremely well delivered, and then suddenly, for no reason whatsoever - in front of the judge and the audience and God knows who - they turn around and kiss each other. ... It's such a coy ending now.'22 While Lang is perfectly correct that dramatically the kiss is unnecessary, in one sense it was necessary - the studios are less concerned with dramatic accuracy, but with resolving all the major strands. Consequently this kiss makes it perfectly clear, that the two lovers are reunited and so can return to their equilibrium (as can the audience).

Adding a kiss may seem a minor intervention (though the studio clearly considered it to be of vital importance), but it was merely a foreshadow of things to come. By the time of Cloak and Dagger (1946) the studios were cutting whole sections from Lang's films. In the case of this film, in the studio doctored version, the ending consists of: 'the Italian scientist being saved by the Underground: the British aeroplane lands and the American O.S.S. man (who was built around the characteristics of Oppenheimer) has completed his mission; the plane flies away, the girl waves, he waves, and you know they will see each other after the war.'23 As would be expected, Lang's original ending was much less triumphant, finishing with a sergeant coming to report that: '60,000 slave workers have been found dead underneath the cave. Gary Cooper walks outside and at the entrance of the cave is a parachutist - an American boy chewing on a blade of grass. The sun is shining, birds singing. And Cooper says something like: "This is the Year One of the Atomic Age and God help us if we think we can keep this secret from the world, and keep it for ourselves." And this was why I wanted to make the picture. The whole reel was cut out.'24 Lang's indictment of the Atomic Age, his entire reason for making the picture, became simply a efficient spy movie under the Hollywood studio system.

When Fury was released in 1936, it proved a big success with both audiences and critics (highlighting how successfully Lang managed to assimilate himself into this culture), but, according to Lang, MGM were never happy with the film:

When the picture was to be previewed, [W.R.] Wilkerson, [publisher] of The Hollywood Reporter, went to an executive at MGM and said, 'I hear there's an MGM preview somewhere.' The executive said, 'Oh, don't go, it's a lousy picture. It's a horrible, bad picture.' Wilkerson said, 'Now wait a minute, who made it?' And the man said, 'You know, that German son-of-a-bitch, Fritz Lang.'25

The result was, with this negative publicising of their own film, MGM were slightly taken aback by its eventual success. On the back of this success however, MGM offered Lang (sensibly he had only signed a one-picture deal to avoid being tied down): 'a picture, based on a real case in the South, about a Jewish teacher who was accused of killing a schoolgirl and was lynched [They Won't Forget, 1937]. I turned it down. I said, "I don't want to become an expert on lynching films."'26 This is a fairly crude example of the way in which Hollywood stereotypes its employees, this happening in all positions - from directors, to actors, to composers. Because movie making is such an unpredictable process, the studios are looking for any factor which can be repeated without diminishing the returns. This usually results in films with a large amount of repetition, with only very minor variations as distinguishing factors. By contrast:

Production approaches outside Hollywood tend to provide a degree of contrast in each of these areas: instead of a reliance on repetition there is a desire for diversity. A tendency to accentuate the highest degree of difference through the stress on the auteur (generally the director, but occasionally the writer or producer) accentuates the idea of each film expressing an individual's vision. This desire for differentiation is manifest within European cinema as a whole and also within specific national cinemas: Italian cinema is broadly different from, say, Swedish cinema and particular cultures are fascinated by the degrees of difference manifested by individual directors within their distinct national cinemas.27

Probably the best example of Hollywood's attitude in this sense is it usage of genres, which offer precisely what has been mentioned previously - repetition with minor variations - ensuring that the audience knows exactly what to expect from a film. It is perhaps not surprising therefore that after the success of Fury, Lang (aside from a few Westerns) was mainly contracted to work on crime/thriller pictures throughout his American career. By contrast, his German career had included, among other things, science-fiction films (Frau im Mond); adventure films (Die Spinnen); and fantasies (Der müde Tod). Typical of this stereotyping is that Lang had remained interested in science fiction while in America, and by the late forties was trying to interest various studios in making a contemporary story of space travel, tentatively called Rocket Story. None of them were interested however, and so by 1950 Lang was making another crime film, House by the River, while Irving Pichel's Destination Moon (a documentary style account of a race between the Americans and Russians to reach the moon first) was proving a massive success with audiences.

As an European émigré, Fritz Lang's experiences as a director can be regarded as fairly typical. After an early period in Europe which first brought him success and international acclaim, it was not long before the move to Hollywood came in a desire to reach larger audiences. The differences between these two styles of film-making however, means that it is rarely anything less than a struggle for European directors to adapt to the commercial pressures imposed by the Hollywood studios, and the resultant factors which often override the already difficult process of making a film. While Lang did manage to adapt better than most, mainly because he was willing to change his style (and also saw the validity in doing so), the result was again all too common - after twenty years of warring with insensitive producers (and also false accusations that he was a communist) he was forced out of Hollywood by the end of the fifties, returning to the country where his career had begun in an attempt to rediscover some of the freedom he had enjoyed in the past (though by this stage his career was close to its end anyway). Speaking of the two films he made on his return to Germany at the end of the sixties - Der Tiger von Eschnapur and Das indische Grabmal - Lang said: 'I didn't make these pictures because I thought they were important, but because I was hoping that if I made somebody a great financial success I would again have the chance - as I had with M - to work without restrictions. It was my mistake.'28

Lang's eventual dissatisfaction with the Hollywood studio system ties in to a certain degree with the way his entire output is often viewed critically. Throughout this essay, I have been regarding the division between the two major periods of Lang's career as both temporal and cultural, but there is also a third, qualitative, division that is commonly made - namely that Lang's most important work comes almost entirely from the period he spent in Germany in the early part of the twentieth century, Gaivn Lambert's statement in Sight and Sound typifying this attitude: 'after his first two pictures in Hollywood (Fury, You Only Live Once), Lang went into decline, with only occasional flashes of his former talent and personality.'29 A large part of the reason for this undoubtedly comes down to the fact that the European style of film-making is primarily concerned (at least it directors are) with producing pieces which can be regarded as art. This can mean that they are more immediately seen worthy of value and serious study than pieces which have been produced by the more commercially driven Hollywood system. A brief example from Lang's career is the clear links to expressionism which can be seen in the German films of his first period. But the view that all Lang's best work is weighted in the first half of his career (described by Peter Bogdanovich as: 'as tedious and inaccurate a cliché as the theory that Hitchcock's British films are better than his American ones, that John Ford never made another movie quite as good as The Informer, or that Orson Welles hasn't done anything worth discussing since Citizen Kane.'30), is clearly unfairly disregarding the quality of the work he was able to produce during his time in Hollywood. For while the two systems of film-making are clearly vastly different (meaning that few directors are able to move between them as successfully as Lang), they are both equally valid, and with equal potential for delivering high quality films.

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Internet Sites

(1) Fritz Lang

• BFI - Fritz Lang: Master of Darkness
• Fritz Lang: Master of Light & Shadow

• Hyde Flippo, 'Metropolis and Fritz Lang (1890-1976)'
• Michael E. Grost, 'Fritz Lang'
• E.H. Larson, 'Fritz Lang'
• Rod Stoneman, 'Under the shadow of Hollywood: the industrial versus the artisanal'
• Rob White, 'The Permanent Magic of Fritz Lang'

(3) Other Relevant Sites/Articles

• The Internet Movie Database
• Hyde Flippo, 'Ufa, Berlin and Hollywood'
• Hyde Flippo, 'The Ufa Story'

Bogdanovich, Peter, Fritz Lang in America, Studio Vista Limited (1967)
Eisner, Lotte, Fritz Lang, Secker & Warburg (1976)
McGilligan, Patrick, Fritz Lang: the nature of the beast, St. Martin's Press (1997)

Allen Eyles, 'The Studio System', The Movie, Volume 1, pp. 61-63.
Herbert Holba, 'Continental Sound', The Movie, Volume 1, pp. 81-84.
David Overbey, 'Fritz Lang', The Movie, Volume 1, pp. 88-91.
Lotte H. Eisner, 'M', The Movie, Volume 1, pp. 92-93.
Vicki Wegg-Prosser, 'Film and Fascism', The Movie, Volume 1, pp. 161-164.
Thomas Elsaesser, 'Fritz Lang: The Illusion of Mastery', Sight and Sound, Janauary 2000, pp. 18-22.

(1) Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 97: World English Edition © 1993-1996 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Contributor and article title:

Kevin Gough-Yates, 'Art Cinema'
Barry Salt, 'Cinema, History of'
Barry Salt, 'Fritz Lang'
Barry Salt, 'German Cinema'
Barry Salt, 'Pommer, Erich'

(2) Microsoft Cinemania 97 © 1992-1996 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

General reference source which includes a biography of Fritz Lang, several reviews for most of his films, and information on German and American cinema.