Editing Fritz Lang (section)

=== Hollywood career (1936–1957) ===
Lang made twenty-two features in his 20-year American career, working in a variety of genres at every major studio in [[Hollywood (film industry)|Hollywood]], and occasionally producing his films as an independent. He became a [[naturalized citizen]] of the United States in 1939.<ref name="NYT20090515">{{cite news|last=Kehr|first=Dave|url=|title=Fritz Lang, Trailing Nazis|work=The New York Times|date=15 May 2009}}</ref>

Signing first with [[MGM]] Studios, Lang's crime drama ''[[Fury (1936 film)|Fury]]'' (1936) saw [[Spencer Tracy]] cast as a man who is wrongly accused of a crime and nearly killed when a lynch mob sets fire to the jail where he is awaiting trial. However, in ''Fury'', he was not allowed to represent black victims in a lynching scenario or to criticize racism, which was his original intention.<ref>{{cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ELNZDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA98 |title=Women Activists and Civil Rights Leaders in Auto/Biographical Literature and Films |publisher=Springer International Publishing |year=2018 |isbn=978-3-319-77081-9 |editor-last1=Letort |editor-first1=Delphine |location=Cham, Switzerland |page=98 |access-date=September 7, 2018 |editor-last2=Lebdai |editor-first2=Benaouda}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |last=Scott |first=Ellen C. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=27fQBQAAQBAJ&pg=PA1736 |title=Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era |publisher=[[Rutgers University Press]] |year=2015 |isbn=978-0-8135-7137-9 |page=1736 |access-date=September 7, 2018}}</ref> By the time ''Fury'' was released, Lang had been involved in the creation of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, working with [[Otto Katz]], a Czech who was a [[Comintern]] spy.<ref>{{cite news|last=Hoberman|first=J.|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/movies/homevideo/fritz-langs-hangmen-must-die-and-man-hunt-on-blu-ray.html |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20220102/https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/movies/homevideo/fritz-langs-hangmen-must-die-and-man-hunt-on-blu-ray.html |archive-date=2022-01-02 |url-access=limited |url-status=live|title=Fighting the Nazis With Celluloid|work=The New York Times|date=October 9, 2014|access-date=March 26, 2021}}{{cbignore}}</ref> He made four films with an explicitly anti-Nazi themes, ''[[Man Hunt (1941 film)|Man Hunt]]'' (1941), ''[[Hangmen Also Die!]]'' (1943), ''[[Ministry of Fear]]'' (1944) and ''[[Cloak and Dagger (1946 film)|Cloak and Dagger]]'' (1946). ''Man Hunt'', wrote [[Dave Kehr]] in 2009, "may be the best" of the "many interventionist films produced by the Hollywood studios before Pearl Harbor" as it is "clean and concentrated, elegant and precise, pointed without being preachy."<ref name="NYT20090515" />

[[File:Fritz Lang and Gloria Grahame on set of Human Desire.jpg|270px|thumb|left|Lang with [[Gloria Grahame]] and [[Broderick Crawford]] on the set of ''[[Human Desire]]'']]
His American films were often compared unfavorably to his earlier works by contemporary critics, although the restrained Expressionism of these films is now seen as integral to the emergence and evolution of American genre cinema. ''[[Scarlet Street]]'' (1945), one of his films featuring [[Edward G. Robinson]] and [[Joan Bennett]], is considered a central film in the film noir genre.

One of Lang's most praised ''films noir'' is the police drama ''[[The Big Heat]]'' (1953), known for its brutality. As Lang's visual style simplified, in part due to the constraints of the Hollywood studio system, his worldview became increasingly pessimistic, culminating in the cold, geometric style of his last American films, ''[[While the City Sleeps (1956 film)|While the City Sleeps]]'' (1956) and ''[[Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956 film)|Beyond a Reasonable Doubt]]'' (1956).