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Famous for his ever-present monocle and long cigarette holder, the Austrian filmmaker Fritz Lang was termed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute. Lang's movies were a huge influence on the film noir style, and the darkness and chiaroscuro of his films may have had something to do with the dilemma of his religious heritage.

Fritz Lang

His mother was born Jewish, but later converted to Catholicism. Lang's father was a lapsed Catholic; they raised young Fritz in the Catholic faith. Lang often said he was raised Catholic and "puritanical," although his observance of his religion later in life, beyond mere lip service, is in doubt among his biographers. Notably, Lang would flee Germany in 1934 as the Nazi government was becoming more and more powerful—partly because he abhorred anti-Semitism, and, some speculate, partly because he feared the Nazis would learn of his partly-Jewish roots via his mother.

Born in Vienna in 1890, Lang first encountered anti-Semitism and fascism in the religious school he attended a decade later. He paid little attention to these trends and spent his time reading the likes of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Schiller, Goethe, and Shakespeare. The strict puritanism of the school introduced him to the Madonna/Magdalene dichotomy in viewing women: they were either chaste or sinners. His own family heritage (his grandmother had become pregnant before wedlock) helped underscore this thinking in his worldview. As one biographer puts it, "Tales that taught the pitfalls of love and sex—featuring respectable men ruined by lusty temptresses—would predominate throughout Fritz Lang's career; a blend of eroticism, violent crime, and the supernatural."

Lang traveled the world after school, going to nearly every continent, and then returned to fight in World War I, where he was wounded three times. While recuperating, he was determined to work in the fledgling film industry. He wrote and acted in silent films at first, then started to direct in Berlin just as the Expressionist film movement took off. His first important film Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922) was the first of a Mabuse series of films that he would make throughout his career. He co-wrote the film with Norbert Jacques and his future wife, the prolific screenwriter Thea von Harbou.

Die Nibelungen (1924), a four-hour version in two parts of the Germanic epic, became immensely popular in pre-Nazi Germany and may have even led to the rise of their power in the country, at least by preparing the imagination of the people for conquering the world. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels watched the films repeatedly, casting themselves as the Aryan gods that the German race was built on. The significance of Die Nibelungen was debated in two important film history books: In From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, Siegfried Kracauer claimed certain characters were Jewish sterotypes, while Lotte Eisner, in The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt, claims the art director was influenced by local Russian-Jewish theater groups of the time, and that Lang intended no anti-Semitism.

Lang's silent classic Metropolis (1927), based on the novel and screenplay of the same name by his wife, has strong Judeo-Christian imagery and themes. A science fiction classic, the film critiques capitalism for its flaws. The character Maria retells the story of the Tower of Babel in the "modern" setting of the film, to show how management and the workers cannot communicate nor understand each other because of how society is constructed. Also famous is the creation of a robot designed to replace people, similar to the Frankenstein story, in which man plays God. The end of the film takes place in a cathedral, which has turned into a battle zone (perhaps a metaphor for what the church had and would become in Lang's lifetime).

Like Orson Welles did with Citizen Kane, Lang had total control of a film for once, with M (1931)—and likewise created a masterpiece. Choosing Peter Lorre to play the child murderer Hans Beckert, he cast against type since most villains in the day were large, broad-shouldered men. Lang's first sound film, one key clue in capturing the murderer is in the tune he whistles shortly before he kills. A notoriously difficult director to work with, Lang reportedly threw Lorre down a flight of stairs to make him look bruised and disheveled for his final scene. The final monologue was used in anti-Semitic documentaries in Germany, supposedly showing how Lorre's ostensibly Jewish character couldn't help his weaknesses and needed to be exterminated, and all underscored by the claim that Lang's Jewishness was undeniable. Lang again had teamed with his wife, von Harbou, on this script. A year later, she joined the Nazi party, and they soon divorced.

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