Bully Boy

Fritz Lang stands the test of time better than most of the great movie legends. The spectacle of the epics he directed in Germany in the 1920s, “Die Nibelungen” and “Metropolis,” is still breathtaking. “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse” and its sequels have passed into the mythology of the crime thriller. His first sound film, “M,” which launched Peter Lorre to international fame in the role of the pitiful compulsive sex killer, has never been surpassed as a portrait of morbid psychology and society’s response to it.

In the United States, Lang embarked on a new career with “Fury,” a classic, foreboding study of mob malevolence, and went on to contribute the most seminal of Hollywood films noirs--”You Only Live Once,” “Manhunt,” “The Woman in the Window,” “Scarlet Street” and, above all, “The Big Heat.” He celebrated the West in “The Return of Frank James,” “Western Union” and in the bizarre “Rancho Notorious.” The titles alone stir a yearning to see them over again. Fritz Lang was, after all, a great filmmaker and a great entertainer. Late in life, he insisted, “I am an artisan [he used the German handwerker], not an artist.” Whether he liked it or not, though, he was an artist as well.

Great artists are not necessarily nice people, and Lang, from all accounts, was quite nasty. Few people who knew him in his active years had a good word to say about him, according to Patrick McGilligan’s diligent biography, “Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast.” Hans Feld, a gentle, generous man who, as editor of the leading German trade paper Filmkurier, played a crucial role in Lang’s early career, concluded that Lang was “a nasty customer.” The producer Gottfried Reinhardt, who worked with Lang in Hollywood, thought him “a dishonorable man, a totally cynical man.” “I only knew the nasty side of him” sighed his longtime and devoted agent, Sam Jaffe. “Lang makes you want to puke,” wrote Kurt Weill. “Nobody in the whole world is as important as he imagines himself to be.” Even an avowed friend of later years, the British scenarist Charles Bennett, had to admit: “I liked Fritz, but not his arrogance and self-satisfaction.”

Born to a middle-class Viennese family in 1890, as a youth Lang toyed with the idea of being an architect or some kind of artist. After service in the German army during World War I, he moved to Germany and began to write and then direct films. His private habits and moral attitudes were largely shaped in the willful decadence of the art world of Weimar Berlin, a postwar era of economic hysteria and political, social and artistic revolution. His experiments with drugs and erratic sexuality were widely rumored; his womanizing was quite public. His various wives and mistresses were all made to understand that no partnership could restrict his roving. His first wife, Lisa Rosenthal, died from a gunshot wound in the chest in the Langs’ apartment. Lang and Thea von Harbou, his mistress, scenarist and the wife of his leading actor, were in the apartment at the time, but Lang was already a big enough figure in the film world for the affair to blow over without ever being satisfactorily explained.

Subsequently married and professionally inseparable as a director-writer team, Lang and Harbou became a golden couple in Berlin society although, as Harbou later said, “We were married for 11 years because for 10 years we didn’t have time to get divorced.” Two of the innumerable mistresses of these years played more prominent roles in his life than the rest. The beautiful Gerda Maurus was the leading lady of Lang’s last silent films, “Spies” and “Woman in the Moon.” Lily Latte entered Lang’s life in 1931 and remained a devoted and constantly abused friend, companion, secretary and assistant to the end, even organizing the supply of prostitutes that Lang demanded into his 80s. In the last days of his life, Lang made Latte his wife (though McGilligan has found no formal record of a marriage) and heir.

Lang was probably a bona fide sadist. Maurus was known to arrive for work with her face disfigured from the previous night’s lovemaking. His bullying on set was a byword. “The director’s tendency was to flatter the powerful, while picking on the weak and vulnerable, not only the crew, but the lowly extras,” writes McGilligan. Fearless himself (he won several military decorations in World War I), Lang enjoyed witnessing danger. On the set of “Metropolis,” he had scores of extras picked out of the Berlin slums, swimming for their lives in the flood scene, and he would not permit the star, Brigitte Helm, to use a double for the scene in which she is burned at the stake. On other sets, he forced Maurus to sprint and stand for long hours immediately after an appendectomy.

He bullied and humiliated a long succession of vulnerable actresses, including Gloria Grahame and, in “Clash by Night,” a young Marilyn Monroe: “He erupted whenever she bungled her lines, a regular event inevitably followed by the actress crumpling in tears.” Actress Anna Lee recalled that on “Hangmen Also Die,” Lang forced her to act barefoot and would step on her feet in his heavy boots, leaving permanent scars. When she had to thrust her hand through a window, he insisted it be made of real glass. When she bled profusely, he started “sucking the blood from my hand like an old vampire.” Most despicable, perhaps, was his bullying of the 10-year-old Jon Whiteley on the set of “Moonfleet,” blaming the child for the production delays. One of his least appealing qualities was always to blame other people--though most often producers--for everything that went wrong.

*

A gifted raconteur (naturally), he reshaped every story in which he was involved, in life as well as art, to put his own role in the most flattering light. This makes him a difficult case for biographers. Excellent as they were, Lang’s earlier chroniclers, such as Peter Bogdanovich and Lotte Eisner, were bewitched by his stories and tended to report them uncritically. An exemplary researcher, McGilligan has checked and cross-checked his details, scouring archives in America and Europe.

Centrally, McGilligan sheds new light on Lang’s departure from Nazi Germany in 1933. As Lang told it (the details varied and grew richer with the years), Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of culture, called him privately to his office. He explained that it had been necessary to ban “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse” (the story of a madman trying to dominate the world was not a particularly tactful theme in Hitler’s Reich); however, Hitler, a great admirer of Lang’s national epic “Die Nibelungen,” wanted him to take charge of German film production. Goebbels assured him that it was no problem that Lang’s mother was a Jew who had converted to Catholicism: “We decide who is Jewish or not.” Lang claimed that he felt so threatened by this poisoned chalice that he left Germany the same night with only the money and jewelry he had on his person and never returned.

McGilligan’s researches, and Lang’s own passport, however, suggest in fact that not only did he return to Berlin several times in the succeeding months but that he managed to take with him money, paintings, antiques and even his archives of scripts, documents and photographic records relating to the classic films. Moreover, there is evidence that before his departure, Lang had found no difficulty in collaborating with the regime.

Much later, Lang was to put a similarly heroic coloring on his experiences in the 1950s during the McCarthy hearings and to claim that he had been blacklisted for a year or more. McGilligan’s evidence indicates, on the contrary, that Lang’s lawyers arrived at comfortable accommodations with the House Un-American Activities Committee investigators to exculpate Lang from his previous associations with many marked left-wing collaborators.

With so many unappealing features, Lang would be an obvious target for the hatchet-wielding expose school of biographers dedicated to exhuming the nastiest secrets of people they despise. McGilligan, despite his years as senior editor of Playgirl, is emphatically not one of these. He manages to maintain an admirable detachment--cool, sympathetic, understanding though not indulgent, often tolerantly amused. Above all, he consistently recognizes that what now matters most about the man is his art and that some of Lang’s seemingly destructive qualities may have come from his single-minded, even fanatical, dedication to the pursuit of elusive perfection. Lang was as unsparing with himself as with others. McGilligan describes his meticulous method, preparing scripts of unparalleled complexity, drawings and elaborate set models on which he planned every shot. He knew so precisely what he wanted that he quite literally directed the big crowd scenes in “Metropolis” by instructing his actors and extras to react as the beat was counted out over megaphones.

The most dedicated Langians may resent McGilligan for exposing the feet of clay with which their hero tended to kick the world at large, and they may also find his critical assessment a shade severe. Conscious of the problems and opposition that beset Lang in making them, McGilligan is critically dismissive of films--such as “You and Me,” “Clash By Night,” “Human Desire”--which nevertheless have their dedicated supporters.

McGilligan’s greatest merit, finally, is to understand the man and to make readers understand him. Particularly in Lang’s American period, the tantrums and brutalities and resentments no doubt reflected his deep disappointments and frustrations. It cannot have been easy for Lang to come from Germany, where he was tyrant-king of the studios, to Hollywood, where he was a mere employee, a cog in the studio system, a vassal of the philistines he despised, like MGM’s Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures.

By the end, McGilligan even has you reluctantly liking--certainly pitying--the old man, blind and finally unable to make films, which had been the point of his life. Our last sight of Lang is of a humbled despot, anxiously assuring everyone that he has “mellowed,” forgetting the old enmities; basking in the flattery of young critics and film museum tributes, eagerly confiding his version of the way things were to trusting interviewers and sadly (and mistakenly) convinced that the only real achievement of his life was “M” and that all the rest was waste. The only confidant Lang trusted in these last lonely years was a wooden monkey he called Peter, which had been a farewell present from Gerda Maurus in 1931. He was buried with it in August 1976, at Forest Lawn Cemetery.