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Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast. Patrick McGilligan. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997. 548 pages. $30.00 cloth.
Fritz Lang was born in 1890 in the old imperial city of Vienna. Defying his parents wishes that he follow his father's profession of architecture, at age twenty Lang left home to study art in Munich and Paris. After school Lang spent the next few years traveling the globe. During his Wanderschaft he visited the Far East, Russia, the South Pacific, and North Africa before he returned to Paris in 1913 and resumed the bohemian life of an artist. To support himself he contributed cartoons to German language newspapers, did some fashion designing, and painted watercolors. In 1914 he returned to Vienna and was conscripted into the Austrian army at the outbreak of World War I. He eventually rose to the rank of lieutenant; he was also wounded four times. It was while convalescing that he began to write short fiction and dramas, and he sold several to various movie directors.
Lang moved to Berlin and joined the film company Decla as a story editor and before long was writing screenplays himself. He directed his first film, Halbblut (The Half-Breed), in 1919. His rise in the industry was rapid and soon he was turning out the films that would earn him an international reputation: Die Spinnen (The Spiders, 1919-20); Doktor Mabuse, der Spieler (Doctor Mabuse, the Gambler, 1922); Die Nibelungen (The Nibelungs, 1924); Metropolis (1927); Spione (Spies, 1928); Die Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon, 1929); M (1931); and the third film in the Mabuse trilogy and his last pre-war German film, Dos Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse, 1933). According to Lang, in 1933 he was summoned quite suddenly to the office...