49 Fun Facts About Fritz Lang

Lang made his name in Berlin, but which other capital was his birthplace?

Vienna was where Lang briefly studied civil engineering before dropping it for art; by his own account he then roamed Europe, North Africa and Asia.

Lang said his first sight of which city's skyscrapers inspired Metropolis?

New York. Lang always credited the glaring lights and tall buildings of that first visit, but the idea for the film was already months old when he arrived.

In Lang's 1921 fantasy Destiny, a young woman pleads for her lover's life with which figure?

Death. Weary himself, he lets her try to save one of three doomed lives, in the Middle East, Venice and China, and every one of the three candles still burns out.

Which Lang film pioneered the rocket-launch countdown?

Woman in the Moon swapped the count-ups of earlier rocket stories for a countdown to build suspense before liftoff, and real mission controls later did the same.

Where did Lang, an army officer in World War I, start writing his first film scenarios?

In a military hospital: wounded several times and left blind in his right eye, Lang filled his convalescence with scripts and had sold some to a film producer before the war ended.

How do the rioting workers of Metropolis punish the false Maria, exposing the robot underneath?

They burn her at the stake, and the fire strips away the human disguise. Lang insisted on real flames around his lead actress for the scene.

Lang's 1943 anti-Nazi thriller Hangmen Also Die! was written with which exiled German writer?

Bertolt Brecht wrote the story with Lang, turning the 1942 assassination of Nazi governor Reinhard Heydrich in Prague into a manhunt thriller that reached cinemas within a year of the killing.

In Lang's two-part crime epic of 1922, which power does the master criminal Dr. Mabuse use on his victims?

Hypnosis. Mabuse wills rich gamblers into throwing away fortunes at the card table, and the man who controls every mind ends the film by losing his own.

Lang's first hit as a director, a 1919 adventure serial, was named after which creatures?

Spiders. Die Spinnen pits an adventurer against a crime syndicate of that name in a race for Inca gold, and it sold so well that a second part was rushed into production.

Lang's 1944 spy thriller Ministry of Fear was adapted from a novel by which British author?

Graham Greene. In Lang's version a man just released from an asylum wins a cake at a village fête, and the Nazi spies who meant it for someone else hunt him across wartime London.

Which actor played the child killer in M, his first starring role?

Peter Lorre was a Berlin stage actor when this role made him famous worldwide; three years later Alfred Hitchcock cast him, and Hollywood kept him playing villains for decades.

Which piece does the killer in M compulsively whistle?

In the Hall of the Mountain King, from Grieg's Peer Gynt, warns the audience that the killer is near before he is seen. The star could not whistle, so Lang dubbed the tune himself.

In Lang's M, what does the letter chalked onto the hunted man's coat stand for?

Mörder, meaning murderer. A beggar chalks the M on his own palm and slaps it onto the man's back so he can be followed through the streets, and the mark gave the film its title.

In M, who catches the child killer before the police?

The city's criminals. Constant police raids were ruining business for thieves and safecrackers, so they set the beggars to watch every street and put the killer on trial themselves.

Which star played the saloon singer who runs an outlaw hideout in Lang's 1952 western Rancho Notorious?

Marlene Dietrich. Her ranch, Chuck-a-Luck, hides any outlaw who can pay and asks no questions, until a cowboy hunting his fiancée's killer talks his way inside.

Which Lang film did the Nazi regime ban in March 1933?

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse has a madman running a crime ring from his asylum cell. Lang later said he had put Nazi slogans in the villain's mouth; Goebbels stopped the film before its Berlin premiere.

According to Lang, what did Goebbels offer him at their 1933 meeting?

Head of the UFA studio, the top job in German film, is Lang's own story. He said he fled the country that same night, but his passport shows him coming and going for months afterwards.

Lang's You Only Live Once drew on which real-life outlaws?

Bonnie and Clyde became an ex-convict wrongly condemned for murder and the wife who goes on the run with him; the famous film about the real pair came thirty years later.

Lang's French film Liliom came from a play that later became which Broadway musical?

Carousel. Rodgers and Hammerstein moved Molnár's fairground barker from Budapest to the coast of Maine in 1945, eleven years after Lang filmed the play with Charles Boyer.

Who played Frank in Lang's The Return of Frank James?

Henry Fonda had already played Frank in Jesse James a year earlier; Lang's Technicolor sequel picks up after Jesse is shot and sends his brother out to settle the score.

Which star played a man nearly lynched in Lang's first Hollywood film, Fury (1936)?

Spencer Tracy plays an innocent man jailed on thin evidence for a kidnapping. A mob burns the jail, he secretly survives, and he lets his attackers stand trial for killing him.

In Lang's 1941 Man Hunt, which leader does a British hunter get in his sights?

Hitler. Caught as he takes aim, the hunter insists it was only a sporting stalk, and spends the film on the run from Nazi agents; it opened six months before America entered the war.

Which pair starred in Lang's noirs The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street?

Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennett first played a professor undone by the woman from a portrait. Lang reunited them within a year, casting him as a meek cashier she and her lover fleece.

Which future superstar took a supporting role in Lang's 1952 drama Clash by Night?

Marilyn Monroe was billed fourth here, behind Barbara Stanwyck, Paul Douglas and Robert Ryan. By the next year, with Niagara, she was the name above the title.

Who plays Detective Dave Bannion in The Big Heat?

Glenn Ford plays a family man turned avenger: when a car bomb meant for him kills his wife, Bannion hands in his badge and goes after the mob alone.

What does Lee Marvin's gangster throw in Gloria Grahame's face in The Big Heat?

Boiling coffee, straight from the pot, scars half her face. Near the end she returns to his penthouse and throws a scalding potful back at him.

Lang's 1954 noir Human Desire was based on La Bête humaine, a novel by which French writer?

Émile Zola. Lang moved his 1890 story of a train driver drawn into a married couple's crime to an American railroad town, and reunited the two leads of The Big Heat to play it.

Lang's late-1950s comeback for a West German producer was a two-part adventure set in which country?

India. The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb retold a story Lang had helped write in the early 1920s, only to see another director film it; he waited nearly forty years to make it himself.

What was Lang's final film as director?

The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse revived his 1922 master criminal in a hotel wired to spy on every room. It was a big enough hit to launch a run of sequels, but Lang left those to others and retired to California.

In which 1963 Jean-Luc Godard film did Lang appear as himself?

Contempt has Lang playing himself as the director of a film of Homer's Odyssey, at odds with a crude American producer over how to tell it. Godard had never worked on so large a scale.

At which film festival did Lang chair the 1964 jury that gave its top prize to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg?

Cannes. Lang, then 73, presided with Charles Boyer as his vice president, thirty years after directing him in his one French film.

Which writer, then Lang's wife, wrote both the novel and the screenplay of Metropolis?

Thea von Harbou co-wrote Lang's films for over a decade. When he left Nazi Germany she stayed, and kept writing for its studios.

Which actress played both Maria and the robot in Metropolis?

Brigitte Helm was a teenager making her first film. The robot's shell was moulded piece by piece onto a plaster cast of her body, and she had to act from inside it.

Which novelist called Metropolis the silliest film?

H. G. Wells wrote that he could not believe a sillier film was possible and complained that it lifted ideas from older books, his own among them.

Hundreds of child extras were needed for which Metropolis sequence?

The great flood. As the workers' city went under, Lang kept ordering the children and the adult extras to throw themselves at the most powerful water jets.

Which line closes Metropolis?

The mediator between head and hands must be the heart: the hero joins the hands of his father, the city's master, and the workers' foreman. Critics in 1927 praised the spectacle and derided this moral as sentimental.

Which music producer released a pop-scored 1984 version of Metropolis?

Giorgio Moroder tinted the film, cut it to under 90 minutes and added songs by Freddie Mercury, Pat Benatar and Adam Ant. His reward was two Golden Raspberry nominations for the music.

In which city was a near-complete print of Lang's original Metropolis cut found in 2008?

Buenos Aires. A battered copy in the city's film museum turned out to hold almost all the footage cut after the 1927 premiere, and the restored film was first shown in Berlin in 2010.

Which Star Wars droid was inspired by the Maschinenmensch of Metropolis?

C-3PO. Concept artist Ralph McQuarrie based his first paintings of the droid on Lang's female robot, redrawn as a male figure, and its Art Deco lines survived every later redesign.

Which Queen video uses clips from Metropolis and ends 'Thanks to Metropolis'?

Radio Ga Ga. The traffic ran both ways in 1984: the video borrowed Lang's towering city and its marching workers, while Freddie Mercury sang Love Kills on that year's re-release of the film.

In 2001 Metropolis was added to which UNESCO register?

Memory of the World. UNESCO inscribed the negative of the 2001 restoration, the fullest version then known; seven years later a longer print surfaced and the film had to be restored all over again.

What was the profession of Fritz Lang's father, Anton?

Architect and builder: Anton Lang was a partner in a big construction firm. Strictly he was a master builder, a rank below the architect his son later liked to call him.

In which city was Lang living as a painter when World War I broke out in 1914?

Paris. As an Austrian he was suddenly on enemy soil; he made it home, and within months was in uniform on the other side.

Lang's Scarlet Street and Human Desire were both remakes of films by which French director?

Jean Renoir had filmed both stories in France in the 1930s, as La Chienne and La Bête humaine. Lang carried them across the Atlantic and reset them in America.

Which dragon-slaying hero gives his name to the first half of Lang's 1924 epic Die Nibelungen?

Siegfried. He bathes in the dragon's blood to become invincible, but a falling leaf leaves one spot on his shoulder unprotected, and the second film is his widow's revenge for what follows.

Which company's push across the Great Plains in 1861 is the subject, and the title, of a 1941 Lang frontier film?

Western Union. Shot in Technicolor in Arizona and Utah, it follows the crews stringing a telegraph line across the plains, with Randolph Scott as an outlaw trying to go straight.

Which French star played the writer's wife in the 1963 Jean-Luc Godard film where Lang appears as himself?

Brigitte Bardot. Her character's marriage to the writer hired to rework Lang's script falls apart during the shoot, and she ends up leaving with the producer.

Which horror legend played the heir in Lang's While the City Sleeps?

Vincent Price plays the spoiled heir who dangles a top job before his newsmen: it goes to whoever first unmasks the 'Lipstick Killer', and they scheme against one another to win it.

Lang's Die Nibelungen drew on the same medieval legend as a famous opera cycle by which composer?

Richard Wagner. His Ring cycle mixes the tale with Norse sagas, while Lang went straight back to the German epic poem written around 1200.