Today we’re celebrating the birth of Fritz Lang, although some people might not be as some of the information I’ve found points to him not being a nice person. I admit it’s challenging to find information about him as the resources I’ve found sometimes contradict each other and themselves. He fought in WWI in Russia and Rumania for the Austrian army and while he was recuperating from war wounds/shell shock he started writing. He started directing films in about 1918 producing his most famous movie, Metropolis.

Lang was married three times with the marriages finishing when the current wife found proof of his infidelity. He was apparently quite hard to work with and many actors refused to work for him. One of the flood scenes in Metropolis took 14 days to film, it included the regular cast and 500 children from the poorest districts of Berlin in a constantly flooded set which Lang deliberately kept at a low temperature. One simple scene where Freder (our hero) collapses at Maria’s feet took three days and at the end the actor Gustav Fröhlich could barely stand from exhaustion.

He may not have been a nice person to work with but he did produce amazing films. His masterpiece is Metropolis, a movie that’s been celebrated, cut, mostly restored and adapted while the music has been released and rerecorded in many different forms. Originally it was too long for the cinemas so a number of communist themed scenes were cut, Georgio Moroder restored and re-released it with a new soundtrack (one of the songs was done by Queen and their filmclip is something that flashes through my mind on many occasions), in 2008 a copy of the original movie was found in Argentina after much restoration work most of the movie was recovered and this was subsequently released in 2010.