Master of the Many Worlds He Created

They’re not calling it “Fritz Lang: The Masterpieces Nobody Knows,” but the title fits.

Starting Friday night with an unprecedented L.A. screening of his 1929 “Spione” (Spies) at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a tribute to the great director’s German films gets underway that’s so significant it takes three institutions to host it: the academy, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the UCLA Film and Television Archive. (Its actual name is “The Architect of Destiny: Fritz Lang in Germany.”)

Except for “M” and “Metropolis,” the Lang works familiar to American audiences come from his prolific Hollywood period spotlighted by LACMA last month in a series called “The Minister of Fear: Lang in America,” which featured such gems as “Fury,” “The Big Heat,” “You Only Live Once,” “The Woman in the Window” and “Scarlet Street.”

But splendid as those films are, they are only part of the reason fellow filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein, Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Bunuel, Jean-Luc Godard and Stanley Kubrick considered Lang a director to emulate.

The works that initially made Lang’s reputation were created in the nearly 15 years he worked in Germany as a director of silents. These films are almost never screened in the U.S. because they are decidedly on the long side, require musical accompaniment, have subtitles incompletely translated into English and haven’t always existed in watchable prints.

Although the length is a given, all the other objections have been banished for this series. In fact, one of the impetuses for it was the creation by German film archives of crisp, new, more complete prints of 1925’s “Metropolis” and both parts of “Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler,” among others. All screenings will feature some form of English translation as well as live music, with the most elaborate being the academy’s presentation of “Spies,” to be accompanied by the 15-piece Robert Israel Orchestra.

To see the Lang films of this period is to experience a kind of revelation. Working closely with his wife, screenwriter Thea von Harbou, and taking advantage of the kind of scope he was not given in Hollywood, Lang was preeminently a creator of worlds. A bear for specificity in buildings, furnishings and clothing, his gift was for bringing entire societies--from the mythic past of “Die Niebelungen” to the decadence of his own 1920s Berlin in “Dr. Mabuse” to the futureworld of “Metropolis”--powerfully to life.

More than creating worlds, Lang used his legendary autocratic on-set behavior to just about will his unbending intensity into his actors’ performances. The urgency of the narrative, of his commitment to both the art of storytelling and the examination of societies, is a Lang constant.

What he most wanted to do, Lang told an interviewer in 1928, was “to create an art--perhaps a new art--with the aid of the moving image and its nearly unlimited technical possibilities,” and the strength of that desire is visible in all these films.

“Spies,” Friday’s opener, is an excellent place to start. Lang regular Rudolph Klein-Rogge stars as Haghi, the all-powerful criminal mastermind who looks like Lenin and spends his time controlling a massive network of spies with an eye toward (what else?) eventual world domination.

Starting with a rapidly cut gangbusters opening that all but grabs you by the throat, this propulsive thriller follows the twists and turns of the troubled romance between Haghi’s top agent, the beautiful Sonja, and Agent No. 326, the mastermind’s implacable enemy. A film called the director’s most underrated silent by Patrick McGilligan, author of the definitive “Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast,” “Spies” was for decades available only in a truncated 88-minute version. Now fully restored to 175 minutes, a length never before presented in L.A., it will probably be decades more, if ever, before it plays here this way again.

Also in excellent shape are Lang’s most familiar German works, especially the science-fiction milestone “Metropolis” and its look at a society powered by slaves who service heartless machines while an effete elite lives in luxury. Generally considered to be the costliest and most ambitious film made in Europe up to that time, utilizing 750 actors and 37,000 extras, “Metropolis” has been restored before (once to the accompaniment of a Giorgio Moroder score), but this latest effort was acclaimed as the best at its 2001 Berlin Film Festival premiere.

As for “M,” arguably Lang’s greatest film, it can’t be seen on the big screen too often. Starring Peter Lorre in his career-making role as a guilt-ridden child murderer hunted down by a city’s aroused criminal element, it combines stark realism and imaginative expressionism in an unforgettable way.

Going in a completely different direction is Lang’s 1922-24 “Die Niebelungen.” Broken up into two 21/2-hour films, “Siegfried” and “Kriemhild’s Revenge,” this potent epic, overflowing with elemental passions, is based on the same material that inspired Wagner’s “Ring” cycle.

Here’s the unyieldingly Aryan Siegfried killing the dragon that was one of the wonders of silent-era special effects but now looks a bit like the Ollie of 1950s TV.

Here’s the beautiful Kriemhild, with blond braids to die for, turning into an implacable avenger in the story’s apocalyptic “blood cries out for blood” finale. Stunningly shot, richly atmospheric and thoroughly cinematic, “Die Niebelungen’s” age gives it the unexpected advantage of looking like it was originally created as a cinema verite record of those far-distant events.

In 1922’s two-part “Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler,” showing at UCLA, Lang and Von Harbou created one of their most paradigmatic protagonists, an evil force who was determined to control the world for his own ends. A counterfeiter and master manipulator of the stock market by day, Dr. Mabuse (Klein-Rogge at his best) lectured on the place of psychology in modern medicine by night. With “evil eyes like the devil’s,” the doctor could control men’s minds with his unwavering stare. And, needless to say, he was never up to any good.

With its two parts adding up to 41/2 hours of screen time, “Dr. Mabuse” nevertheless never feels as if it’s dawdling. As cool and calculating as its namesake, the film is fascinating for its look at Weimar Berlin, where the typical attitude, one character says, is “we are bored to death, we need sensations of special kinds to make our lives bearable.” (The Mabuse character proved so intriguing that Lang and Von Harbou revisited it in one of his first sound films, 1932’s peppy “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse,” screening at LACMA.)

Also not to be missed before it comes down Oct. 14 is an exhibition in the academy’s Fourth Floor Gallery called “Fritz Lang: Vienna-Berlin-Paris-Hollywood.” It showcases all manner of intriguing items, from a pen-and-ink drawing for that fierce dragon to a “count me in” telegram from Edward G. Robinson signaling his agreement to what became “Scarlet Street.”

And there are the posters from Lang’s films, some of which, like “Dr. Mabuse,” “M” and “Siegfried,” are among the most spectacular ever made. Ever the perfectionist, his insistence on quality paid dividends even here. *

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The Fritz Lang Festival Schedule

Showing at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 8949 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 247-3600:

Friday at 8 p.m.: “Spies”

Showing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 857-6010 (all screenings are at 7:30 p.m.):

Friday: “Metropolis”

Oct. 5: “Siegfried”

Oct. 6: “Kriemhild’s Revenge”

Oct.12: “Destiny,” “M”

Oct. 13: “Harakiri,” “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse”

Showing at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, Melnitz Hall, near the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Hilgard Avenue, Westwood, (310) 206-FILM:

Oct. 11 at 7 p.m.: “Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler”