Review by Choice Review
Undaunted by the Austrian American film director's avowal that he was determined to carry his secrets to the grave, McGilligan attempts to unearth every dark truth in Lang's private and artistic life. The results constitute a kind of sparring match between investigating author and elusive subject. Lang invented the circumstances of his own life with the same ingenious, twisted flair that he employed in crafting masterpieces like Metropolis, M, and The Big Heat. MCGilligan sifts through tangles of fact and fiction to tease out a portrait far more comprehensive--and, frankly, more lurid and unlikable--than anything written on Lang to date. Particularly interesting is new information about the circumstances of Lang's departure from Nazi Germany and his subsequent combative relations with the Hollywood establishment. As a biography, this volume is a welcome purgative to the hagiography of Lotte Eisner (Fritz Lang, CH, Oct' 77) and the inaccuracies in Peter Bogdanovich's volume of interviews (Fritz Lang in America, CH, Jun'70). Equally valuable is the wealth of production detail about every one of Lang's movies--films dating from his apprentice years in postwar Berlin, the meister years at UFA in the 1920s, and the emigre period in his adopted America from the mid 1930s to his death in 1976. Marring the volume are McGilligan's occasional gossip mongering, cliched diction, labored (and frequently mixed) metaphors, and sloppy sentence structure. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. J. C. Tibbetts University of Kansas
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
In spite of his difficulties with Hollywood's studio system, Lang made some genuine classics, great movies that McGilligan emphasizes in his fluid biography, but he also spends the requisite amount of space on Lang's personal life, which was--surprise--rife with sleaze and scandal.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Genius, womanizer, perfectionist, Nazi, visionary, and tyrant all describe film legend Fritz Lang. McGilligan illustrates some of these terms and answers many questions raised about Lang. Did he murder his first wife? Did Hitler ask him to be the filmmaker for the Third Reich? Did he force extras on the set of his acclaimed Metropolis to work under tortuous conditions? The book is meticulously researched and it seems no detail of Lang's life has been omitted. The author spent four years in Europe interviewing Lang's contemporaries and examining records at government and film archives. Author of acclaimed film biographies, McGilligan has returned with another exceptional work, including a detailed filmography and informative acknowledgments that reconstruct his research. This authoritative biography is highly recommended for academic and public libraries.Lisa N. Johnston, Sweet Briar Coll. Lib., Va. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An adroit and revealing biography of the talented director of such classics as Metropolis and M. Few directors weathered the transition from silent movies to sound as successfully as Lang. His success in doing so may have been, in part, due to the fact that his aesthetic remained essentially visual, a masterful and calculated use of angles, framing, and lighting. Beyond their usefulness in creating tableaux vivants, actors were, he seemed to feel, more of an annoyance than anything else. Not surprisingly, the notoriously perfectionist Lang mistreated some very high-priced talent, including Peter Lorre, Spencer Tracy, and Marlene Dietrich, as well as a raft of hapless producers. As Henry Fonda once remarked: "" 'It just doesn't occur to him that actors are human beings. . . . He is the master puppeteer, and he is happiest only when he can manipulate the blank puppets.' "" Only perhaps in M, the tale of a wretched child-killer, did Lang achieve a full and rich psychological portrait. With his ever-present monocle and soldierly bearing, Lang seemed the epitome of the autocratic Prussian, but in truth he was not only Viennese but half-Jewish and a committed leftist. Soon after Hitler came to power, Lang--then considered Germany's greatest director--went into self-imposed exile in Hollywood. He was a dedicated mythomaniac, and veteran film biographer McGilligan (Jack's Life, 1994, etc.) does an extraordinarily thorough job of separating Lang fact from Lang fable. His retirement years were pure Sunset Boulevard, as the nearly blind Lang kept detailed diaries of the minutiae of his day, conversed with his wooden pet monkey, Peter, and had longtime live-in ex-lover Lilly Latte regularly procure him prostitutes. McGilligan is not a graceful stylist, but he has a great story to tell, and he tells it with verve, originality, and insight. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
