"Human Desire" (1954), made during Fritz Lang's last decade as a film director, begins with an emblematic image: a locomotive rushes forward, swift and dynamic, but locked to the tracks, its path fixed, its destination visible. Like Lang's films the train and the tracks speak of a world of narrowly defined choices. The closing image is even more severe: survivor Glenn Ford departs, his locomotive passing a sign on a bridge. Ford does not see the sign, but we do; abbreviated by intervening beams we suddenly see "The world takes" just before the film ends.
This vision of a hostile universe, constraints on freedom and messages that are missed or misunderstood but always seen by someone, can be found in all of Fritz Lang's films. His work has a consistency and a richness that are unique in world cinema. In Germany, in France, in Hollywood, then in Germany again, Lang built genre worlds for producers and audiences and veiled meditations on human experience for himself.
Lang's vision is that of the outsider. James Baldwin, an outsider himself, catches Lang's "concern, or obsession...with the fact and effect of human loneliness, and the ways in which we are all responsible for the creation, and the fate, of the isolated..." Born an Austrian, Lang fled his training as an architect for a jaunt through the middle and far east, returned to Paris just in time for the beginning of WWI, then fought on the losing side of the war. Recovering from wounds which cost him the sight in his right eye, Lang wrote his first scenarios: a werewolf story which found no buyers, and "Wedding in the Eccentric Club" and "Hilde Warren and Death," which were sold and eventually produced by Joe May. May's deviations from Lang's scripts motivated Lang to become a director himself; his first movie was "Halbblut/The Half-Caste" (1919), a still-lost film about the revenge of a half-Mexican mistress. Later that year he directed the first film of a two-part international thriller called "The Spiders "(1920). Part one, subtitled "The Golden Lake," proved so popular that his producers insisted Lang immediately make part two, "The Diamond Ship". He had been working on another script which he hoped to film, so he reluctantly gave up "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" (1919) to Robert Wiene. His contribution to that landmark film nevertheless was crucial: Lang thought up the framing device, in which it is revealed at the story's end that we have been watching a tale told by a madman, thus significantly undercutting the audience's perceptions of the story.
Lang's career in the 1920s was one of spectacular rise to fame. With each film, he became more assured, garnering critical acclaim as well as a popular following. "Dr. Mabuse the Gambler" (1922), "Die Nibelungen" (1924), "Metropolis" (1927), and "Spies" (1928) are among the greatest silent films produced anywhere. Lang also made a remarkable transition to sound, with "M" (1931), a powerful study of a child murderer pursued by both police and the criminal underworld, but he ran afoul of Nazi authorities with "The Testament of Dr. Mabuse" (1933), whose villains mouthed Nazi propaganda. When the film was banned and Lang was requested to make films for the cause of the Third Reich, he immediately fled Germany, leaving behind most of his personal possessions, as well as his wife, screenwriter Thea von Harbou (who had joined the Nazi party and become an official screenwriter).
Lang made one film in France, then moved on to Hollywood, where he spent the next 20 years working in a variety of genres, mainly thrillers (e.g. "Man Hunt" 1941, "Scarlet Street" 1945, "While the City Sleeps" 1956) and some outstanding westerns ("The Return of Frank James" 1940, "Rancho Notorious" 1952). Tired of warring with insensitive producers, Lang left the U.S. in the mid-1950s to make a film in India and then returned to Germany for his last set of films, including a final chapter in the Dr. Mabuse saga.
The disorienting frame in "Caligari" is an important part of Lang's distinctive vision. His films are punctuated by shifts of viewpoint and discoveries which transform the reactions of his characters--and of his audience. The most obvious of these shifts of viewpoint come in "Caligari" and "The Woman in the Window" (1944), in which the drama is suddenly revealed to be a dream. But they also occur in the "Mabuse" films; in "M", with the policeman mistaken by a burglar for another thief; and in "House By the River" (1950), when a servant is strangled because another maid appears to be responding to her cries for help.
Lang's films are also about contingency, the recognition that extra-personal forces mold our lives, shape our destiny in ways we cannot predict and only somewhat modify. In the two-part film, "Die Nibelungen," Kriemhild is transformed from a secondary figure in the first film ("Siegfried") into a whirlwind of fury in the second ("Kriemhild's Revenge"). Even the characters in the film are shaken by these transformations. The king of the Huns is staggered by Kriemhild's thirst for death; the vengeful underworld in "M" that has captured and tried Peter Lorre is taken aback by Lorre's confession that he "must" rape and murder, that he is something of a spectator to his crimes.
These moments of perception are the foundation of Lang's importance and continuing strength as a filmmaker. They constitute a kind of morality that he never abandoned. In the script for "Liliom" (1934), his French film made after he fled the Nazis, Lang wrote, "If death settled everything it would be too easy...Where would justice be if death settled everything?" Thirty years later, playing himself in Jean-Luc Godard's "Contempt" (1963), Lang wrote for his character, "La Mort n'est pas une solution." ("Death is no solution"). Nor does death erase human striving. In "Der Mude Tod/Destiny" (1921) the force of love survives, in "Fury" (1936) the cycle of vengeance is broken, in "Clash By Night" (1952) Barbara Stanwyck chooses responsibility, in "The Big Heat" (1953) Glenn Ford finally turns to the police and ends his vendetta, and in "Human Desire" Ford again leaves the scene of the crime, choosing life over the locus of death.