Fritz Lang

Fritz Lang was an Austrian born film director whose two most influential German films, Metropolis (1927) and M (1931), made him one of the defining figures of Weimar cinema before he built a second career in Hollywood. Metropolis, an enormous silent production imagining a divided future city, remains one of the most visually ambitious films of the silent era, while M, his first sound film, is a tense manhunt for a child murderer and is widely regarded as a landmark of early sound filmmaking. After the Nazi regime banned his 1933 film The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels summoned Lang and, according to Lang's own oft repeated account, offered him control of the German film industry on the strength of Hitler's admiration for Metropolis; Lang said he left Germany that same night. Surviving passport records show Lang in fact continued to travel into and out of Germany for months afterward, so historians treat the dramatic overnight flight as an embellishment of a departure that was real but less sudden than Lang later told it. He settled first in Paris, then moved to Hollywood, becoming a naturalized United States citizen in 1939 and directing American films including Fury (1936), You Only Live Once (1937) and The Big Heat (1953) that are now counted among the founding works of film noir.