The rocket countdown clock was dreamed up for a 1929 silent film
Fritz Lang's Woman in the Moon imagined a multi-stage rocket rolled slowly to an upright launch pad, with a clock ticking down to lift-off, decades before real launches looked that way. The same Viennese director gave the world Metropolis and M, and laid down much of the visual grammar later called film noir.
Lang was born in Vienna in 1890, the son of an architect and builder. He studied civil engineering before switching to art, travelled widely from 1910 and was painting in Paris in 1913 when the French arrested him as an enemy alien. He escaped to Vienna, served in the Austrian army in Russia and Romania, was wounded four times and lost the sight of his right eye. Recovering, he began writing scenarios, and after the war he was hired as a writer by Erich Pommer's Decla Film in Berlin.
His Weimar career mixed art cinema with popular thrills. With the writer Thea von Harbou, later his second wife, he co-wrote every film until 1933, from the four-hour Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922) to Metropolis (1927), whose overspending hurt the studio UFA and which lost money. M (1931), his first sound film, starred Peter Lorre as a child killer hunted by Berlin's own criminals; Lang reportedly threw Lorre down a staircase to make him look battered. Paranoia, fate and moral ambiguity ran through this German work.
In 1933 the Nazi regime banned The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, in which Lang had put Nazi slogans into a villain's mouth. Lang said Joseph Goebbels offered him the leadership of UFA at the same meeting and that he fled to Paris that night, though his passport shows trips in and out of Germany through 1933. He left Berlin for good on 31 July 1933, having divorced von Harbou, who stayed.
Hollywood brought twenty-two features over two decades and US citizenship in 1939. Fury (1936) attacked lynching, though he was barred from showing Black victims as he had intended, and he made four openly anti-Nazi films. Critics at the time rated his American work below his German films, yet Scarlet Street (1945) and The Big Heat (1953) are now counted as noir landmarks. Nearly blind, he ended his directing with The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), and died in 1976.
Source: Fritz Lang
