Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast [Paperback]

Patrick McGilligan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1998

Named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times and one of the Year's Best Nonfiction Books by Publishers Weekly: The definitive life of the dark genius who gave us M and Metropolis.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Fritz Lang directed Metropolis, M, Liliom, Fury, The Big Heat, and many other of the cinema's enduring masterpieces. But in Patrick McGilligan's assessment, Lang "lived his life--and cultivated his legend--with the glinted eyes of a maniac." Until his death in 1976, Lang carefully manipulated the events of his past, omitting his first wife's mysterious death, his tyrannical treatment of his associates, and his many liaisons with famous women. In this superbly researched and riveting biography, McGilligan peels Lang's autobiographical fictions to reveal the facts about these omissions as well as his flirtation with Nazism, his alleged Communist affiliations, his sadistic tendencies on the set, and his unparalleled cinematic genius. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

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.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 560 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press (November 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312194544
• ISBN-13: 978-0312194543
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.7 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,582,985 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A Missed Opportunity, June 22, 2000

By 

JR Dunn (New Brunswick,, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast (Hardcover)

...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!")

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Well-researched but pointlessly accusatory, August 8, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast (Hardcover)

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.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Compelling but deeply flawed, February 9, 2010

By 

Matt the Knife (Los Angeles, City of the Dead) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast (Paperback)

A reader needs to approach this book with a keen understanding that most biographies (especially Hollywood biographies) are not based on facts; they are based on opinions, assumptions, innuendo, and flat-out lies. If you are seeking a straightforward, informative, fact-based account of the life of Fritz Lang, don't read this book. If, however, you're looking for a compelling portrait of a time, a world, a personality, and the art (and business) of filmmaking, look no further. This is a fascinating portrait, even if it reveals more about the author's biases than about his subject's life. It's still a great read.

The most frustrating aspect of "The Nature of the Beast" is this: it represents the single worst job of copyediting that I've ever seen. The errors are abundant and distracting. The publisher should be embarrassed, and the copy editor should be forced to retake elementary school.