Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast

If any filmmaker is due for a major revival, it is the great German director Fritz Lang (1890-1976). After establishing a place for himself in the pantheon of German cinema with such works as Metropolis, M and the Dr. Mabuse thrillers, Lang fled Hitler in 1933 and ended up in Hollywood, where he made such films as Fury, Scarlet Street, Rancho Notorious and The Big Heat. Lang was the definitive tyrannical Teutonic director, a perfectionist who bullied and alienated nearly everyone who worked with him. His personal life was equally tempestuous, encompassing his marriage to Thea von Harbou, the screenwriter of his major German films, and affairs with Marlene Dietrich, Joan Bennett and many others. Admired by cineastes and other filmmakers, his films are often hard to find, even on video. But this stunning biography by a leading film scholar (George Cukor, etc.) should go far toward reviving Lang's reputation as a filmmaker. McGilligan's research is exhaustive, his knowledge of the cinema encyclopedic and his narration lively. Though an admirer of Lang's work, he is clear-eyed without being prurient about Lang's often seedy personal life and his brutal working methods. Best of all, McGilligan is the first Lang biographer to disentangle the truth from Lang's relentless self-mythologizing. In particular, he unveils the lie behind Lang's most famous story, accepted by nearly all previous accounts, of how Joseph Goebbels allegedly offered him the ""dictatorship"" of the German film industry and of how Lang fled Germany that very night with only the clothes on his back. This book may well be not only the definitive biography of Lang for the foreseeable future, but a longstanding model for film biographies in general. Filmography; photos not seen by PW. (June)