Fritz Lang (1890-1976) was an Austrian-American film director who began his film career as a scriptwriter.  Many of the scripts he wrote in the 1920s were co-written by his wife, Thea von Harbou.  Lang fled Germany in 1933.  By 1936 he was in Hollywood, where he directed films for twenty years, until his differences with producers led to his leaving Hollywood.  He directed films in India until 1959 when he returned to Germany.  In 1963 he portrayed himself in the French film “Le Mepris” which was directed by Jean-Luc Godard.

His early films in America, as in “Fury” in 1936 and “You Only Live Once” in 1937, were about social injustice.  He then directed westerns and psychological mysteries, including “The Woman at the Window” in 1944 and “Scarlet Street” in 1945.  He later returned to the exposure of violence and corruption in “The Big Heat” in 1953.  

Although he was not honored by the American film establishment until a retrospective of his work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1969,  France, Germany, Austria, and Yugoslavia gave him many awards for his contribution to film from the 1950s through the 1970s.  He also received an award for his film “M” from the German Motion Picture Arts Association in 1931.