Lang was becoming something of an authoritarian himself. “Everybody in Berlin was talking about him,” recalled a colleague. “He had joined the ranks of the biggest directors overnight because of the films he had made recently, which everyone admired for their striking images. Insiders told real horror stories about his fanatical devotion to work and the huge demands he made on his crew.” Needing a pubescent beauty for a floor-show scene in his film
As a newly famous director, Lang made a profitable alliance with one of Berlin’s leading screenwriters, Thea von Harbou, who also became his mistress. When his wife, Lisa Rosenthal, expressed outrage over the relationship, Lang threatened her with a pistol. Not long thereafter Rosenthal died of a gunshot fired from Lang’s Browning. The police ruled the death a suicide but many in Berlin believed that 196 the director had killed his wife to get her out of the way. Whatever the truth of the matter, suicide, false accusations, and inadvertent killings became staple ingredients in his films.
Lang’s obsession with his work did not prevent him from becoming a devotee of Berlin’s demimonde. Like the pleasure seekers in Dr. Mabuse, he spent his nights flitting from one sex club and drug den to another, dropping devalued marks by the billions. He regularly dined on venison at Horcher’s and drank at the bar of the Hotel Adlon. The elegant apartment he shared with von Harbou was crammed with paintings by Egon Schiele, exotic masks, and folk art of a decidedly macabre nature. As he bragged in an interview:
Innocent visitors who enter our apartment for the first time find themselves confronted with human scalps, petrified but creepily real, with tiny slivers of mother-of-pearl, the last tears of the victim, gleaming in the eyeholes. But once I tell them the story behind these grotesque and beautifully painted heads, they are no longer horrified but are transformed into a similar but completely different state; for, as Goethe would have put it, ‘Schaudern ist der Menschheit bester Ten’ [The chill of dread is mankinds best quality].
Unluckily for Lang and other German directors, domestic films were experiencing increasing competition from imports, especially from Hollywood. By 1923, the number of American films showing in Germany almost equaled that of the homemade product. German commentators complained about the intellectual vacuity of the American imports, but the German public found these films, with their canned sentimentality, images of fabulous wealth, extreme violence, and wild chase scenes highly compelling. The Hollywood imagination, it seemed, was more closely attuned to German realities than the critics wanted to believe. Within Germany, Hollywood found its most avid audience in Berlin, which after all was Germany’s best answer not only to gangster-ridden Chicago but also to the shoot-’em-up Western frontier—Dodge City on the Spree. Local directors were divided over whether they should resist the taste for Americana or cater to it. One film expert, however, had no doubts about the path Germany must follow: “America is currently in style. We must imitate it in order to steal a march on it and should if possible try to be more American than the Americans.”
Fritz Lang was among the German directors who became swept up in the American tide. He made his first trip to the United States in 1924 and was overwhelmed by the sight of the New York skyline. Later he would claim that this vision inspired his brilliant film
