Fritz Lang

Fritz Lang made Metropolis and M, and left Germany the day after being offered control of its film industry. He was Viennese, wounded four times in the Austro-Hungarian army, and came to film in Berlin in the 1920s, working with his wife Thea von Harbou on scripts. Dr Mabuse the Gambler treats inflation-era Berlin as a criminal enterprise; Metropolis in 1927 built a future city of towers and underground machine halls that has determined how science fiction looks ever since, at a cost that nearly ruined UFA. M, his first sound film, follows a child murderer hunted by the police and the underworld at once, and gives him a defence speech that is the reason the film is still argued about. Goebbels reportedly summoned him in 1933, praised his work and offered him the leadership of German cinema. Lang's own account - which he told all his life and which historians treat with some reserve - has him leaving for Paris that night with the banks closed and nothing but what he could carry. His mother was Jewish by birth. Von Harbou stayed, joined the Nazi party, and the marriage ended. He worked in Hollywood for twenty years on films about mobs, revenge and institutional rot, including Fury and The Big Heat, and was miserable about the studio system throughout. He returned to Germany briefly in the late 1950s and retired to Beverly Hills. Metropolis was cut heavily after its premiere and circulated for eighty years in mutilated form until a near-complete print turned up in Buenos Aires in 2008. The restored version runs about two and a half hours. M was Peter Lorre's first major role and typecast him for two decades.

• Lived: 1890 CE – 1976 CE
• Nationality: Austrian
• Roles: artist