Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast

Rating:
Summary: excellent insight
Review: "Nature of the Beast" is an excellent rendering of Lang's life. From Lang's childhood and early films, to the infamous afternoon flight from the Nazi's and beyond, McGilligan's attention to detail brings Lang's mythology alive (and down to earth). Love him or hate him - there was only one Fritz Lang!

Rating:
Summary: Well-researched but pointlessly accusatory
Review: ...a serious missed opportunity. McGilligan wrote this bio as a man sitting in judgment, holding Lang to a standard so high that the most PC contemporary couldn't possibly meet it.

Whatever Lang does is wrong, no matter what the circumstances. Take his flight from the Nazis. McGilligan discovers serious contradictions in Lang's account of his strange and frightening confrontation with Goebbels. McGilligan's conclusion? That Lang was a Nazi sympathizer himself, the evidence being a delay of two months in leaving Germany. This is nonsense. The book itself demonstrates that Lang made more anti-Nazi films (one in the midst of the isolationist period) than any other director. Thea von Harbou, on the other hand, a full-bore party member who stuck it out until the bitter end, is handled with kid gloves.

A slight contradiction there, as there is in the account of the blacklist era, where Lang, already burned by one gang of political extremists, is condemned for not adequately defending another, clearly portrayed as dishonest and untrustworthy. The man just can't win.

McGilligan also gets some very well-known Hollywood stories wrong (see the Harry Cohn story on p. 398).

Lang may have been a flawed genius, but he was a genius, and deserves to be treated as such (see "Print the Legend" by Scott Eymas to see how it's done). His definitive biography remains to be written. This ain't it.

(The book also suffers from the standard execrable St. Martins copyediting job: "If it ain't in spellcheck, it don't matter!")

Rating:
Summary: A Missed Opportunity
Review: ...a serious missed opportunity. McGilligan wrote this bio as a man sitting in judgment, holding Lang to a standard so high that the most PC contemporary couldn't possibly meet it.

Whatever Lang does is wrong, no matter what the circumstances. Take his flight from the Nazis. McGilligan discovers serious contradictions in Lang's account of his strange and frightening confrontation with Goebbels. McGilligan's conclusion? That Lang was a Nazi sympathizer himself, the evidence being a delay of two months in leaving Germany. This is nonsense. The book itself demonstrates that Lang made more anti-Nazi films (one in the midst of the isolationist period) than any other director. Thea von Harbou, on the other hand, a full-bore party member who stuck it out until the bitter end, is handled with kid gloves.

A slight contradiction there, as there is in the account of the blacklist era, where Lang, already burned by one gang of political extremists, is condemned for not adequately defending another, clearly portrayed as dishonest and untrustworthy. The man just can't win.

McGilligan also gets some very well-known Hollywood stories wrong (see the Harry Cohn story on p. 398).

Lang may have been a flawed genius, but he was a genius, and deserves to be treated as such (see "Print the Legend" by Scott Eymas to see how it's done). His definitive biography remains to be written. This ain't it.

(The book also suffers from the standard execrable St. Martins copyediting job: "If it ain't in spellcheck, it don't matter!")

Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive, balanced, intelligent bio of film genius
Review: Did you know, dear reader, that Fritz Lang invented the backward countdown that is now a staple of blastoff protocol? We can't ever say art doesn't influence life! It becomes clear though that Mr Lang tried very hard to influence the facts so that some important parts of his lifescript were rewritten to make a better story. For example, his "escape" from Nazi Germany which reads like an inferior Hitchcock. But no less than Braque or Malevich in painting, film artists deserve study too. There are many problems facing the student of the latter however, as the film making process might involve thousands of individuals - the analysis can be quite daunting not to mention whose perspective is the more valid amongst the thousands. Author Mr McGilligan is up to the task. It may be that the qualities of Mr Lang revealed by his research - fastidious attention to detail, healthy ego, obsessive number of takes, authoritarian manner on the job - may be the very ones that made him many enemies as well as a great movie maker. Henry Fonda for one loathed Mr Lang 'til the day he died. Mr McGilligan overcomes the problem of what is "true" by giving the reader the best evidence of alternative viewpoints and invites the reader to choose. For example, Mr Lang may have murdered his first wife, or she may have committed suicide with his gun after discovering him and his mistress flagrante delicto. Either way Mr Lang was in some ways a nasty piece of work. He was also elegant, intelligent, a high decorated Viennese war hero, art collector, painter, of Jewish ancestry on one side of his family, who fully participated in the decadence of 1920's Berlin, and 1930's Hollywood. His appetite for sex and drugs is covered in the book. Even in old age he accepted the "services" of an admiring fan and frequented prostitutes almost to his last days. Nevertheless, the creator of TESTAMENT of DR MABUSE, METROPOLIS, RANCHO NOTORIOUS and THE BIG HEAT was a great enough talent to be paid homage to by GODARD and BUNUEL. Whether your taste runs to the production process of film making, the clash of huge egos, eg, Spencer Tracy V Fritz Lang, gossip, or a part-history of 20th century cinema, or analysis of the life and work of one of its great artists, then this book is a real treat.

Rating:
Summary: Well-researched but pointlessly accusatory
Review: McGilligan is a demon researcher, digging up facts, comparing contradictory stories, and writing in a very clear and readable prose. But this book amounts to a steady, unrelenting attack on the character of Fritz Lang, and is even needlessly dismissive of many of his movies.

McGilligan suggests Lang murdered his first wife and that he was a Nazi sympathizer; the former is highly unlikely, the latter is demonstrably false. If anyone has a kind word to say about Lang, their comments are relegated to the last few lines of a paragaph that's otherwise devoted to attacking the director. Lang evidently really was a tyrant on the set, but he also made many friends over the course of his career. It's interesting to note that McGilligan didn't bother to interview Michel Piccoli, the French actor whom Lang regarded almost as an unadopted son.

McGilligan seems to have had an agenda, which was to depict Lang as a completely unsympathetic "beast" (as in the title). NO biographer, especially one as ambitious as McGilligan, should ever present their material with a strong bias, positive or negative. McGilligan's work is more important and meaningful than that of, say, Charles Higham, but this kind of bias dramatically reduces the value of his work.

Rating:
Summary: Terrific biography of the enigmatic Lang
Review: Mr McGilligan has brought his usual exhaustive research to this book about the Man Who Made METROPOLIS. Lang has long been an enigmatic character in the film world, always quick to reinvent his own history through the numerous interviews he has done over the years, most notably with Peter Bogdanovich in the book FRITZ LANG IN AMERICA. McGilligan uncovers much new material on Lang, a man who seems to have had just as dark a side as some of the characters in his films. Interestingly, the author seems to have discovered that he didn't actually like the director much as he researched the book! FRITZ LANG: THE NATURE OF THE BEAST is a compelling read.