Fritz Lang (1890–1976) may not be Hollywood’s greatest genre director—I’d nominate Don Siegel—but, as the mad genius of juvenile trash, Lang stands alone as a genre inventor. His mainly silent Weimar films established the crime epic, the sword and sorcery spectacle, the spy movie, the serial-killer policier, and two types of science fiction. When he came to Hollywood in the mid-’30s, he created the... More >>>