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Fritz Lang

Fritz Lang

The Nature of the Beast

Patrick McGilligan

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560 Pages, 9 x 9 in

Paperback
9780816676552
Published: September 18, 2013

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eBook
9781452940649
Published: September 1, 2013

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Fritz Lang

The Nature of the Beast

Patrick McGilligan

ISBN: 9780816676552

Publication date: September 18th, 2013

560 Pages

9 x 9

"As definitive a Lang as we are likely to get: entertaining, appalling, persuasive." —Steven Bach, L.A. Weekly Literary Supplement

"A beast Lang certainly was. . . . McGilligan, with ferocious research and a touch of wonder—throughout, he seems to be shaking his head in fascination—spreads [his] elements before us: the quasi-diabolist artist, the sadistic perfectionist with his actors, the fervent devotee of truth, the twister of facts, the elegant immoralist, the indefatigable amorist, the disturbing seer into the giant maladies of his epoch. McGilligan’s passion and thoroughness make his Lang biography a permanent resource." —Stanley Kauffmann, New York Times Book Review

The name of Fritz Lang—the visionary director of Metropolis, M, Fury, The Big Heat, and thirty other unforgettable films—is hallowed the world over. But what lurks behind his greatest legends and his genius as a filmmaker? Patrick McGilligan, placed among “the front rank of film biographers” by the Washington Post, spent four years in Europe and America interviewing Lang’s dying contemporaries, researching government and film archives, and investigating the intriguing life story of Fritz Lang. This critically acclaimed biography—lauded as one of the year’s best nonfiction books by Publishers Weekly—reconstructs the compelling, flawed human being behind the monster with the monocle.

Patrick McGilligan is the author of several definitive biographies, including Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light and George Cukor: A Double Life (Minnesota, 2013), a New York Times Notable Book.