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The end of genius is sometimes spectacular: a bomb's explosion, a madman's gibbering, an orgasmic suicide before a sell-out audience. Sometimes—more often, to be sure—it is lonely and poignant, as with most ordinary human beings. Fritz Lang, who had lived a long, colorful, and combative life, was nearing the end. He knew it. The Last Dinosaur spent more and more time in bed as his health waned. His weight continued to slip away, though his journal recorded the same persistent diet that had sustained him for most of his time on earth—pills, martinis, eggs for breakfast, steak, or a Viennese specialty for supper, with something rich and chocolaty for dessert. Call girls visited, but few peers or friends. Few of his contemporaries were left. He never had many real, close friends anyway. And no peers, he might add with a laugh. Irony of ironies, the man with the monocle was virtually blind. He was one of the cinema's greatest visionaries, this director who conjured a mythic world in Die Nibelungen and created a fantastical future in Metropolis. His Dr. Mabuse was the emblematic madman of Hitler's Germany. In M he explored the depths of human depravity. After rejecting a Faustian pact with Joseph Goebbels—if it really happened that way—he came to Hollywood, where he found a second life exploring the depths of America, and his own inner demons , in masterly films like Fury, You Only Live Once, The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street, and The Big Heat. On good days the retired film director got up and moved about, making his way around the house by his fingertips. Youthful acolytes who came calling, bearing their tape recorders, might not even realize the old man could barely see, for he met them at the door with a firm handshake and escorted them into the invariably darkened living room. Lang maintained his pride and theatricality for visitors. He was "elegant" and "courtly," people said afterwardgenteel words used by many to describe the film director in his twilight years. Elegant and courtly, though the director's behavior on the set had reminded many who worked with him in his prime of Adolf Hitler himself. Though he had a history—long, and well known—of sadistic behavior. Though he had been party, perhaps, to the deaths of one or two people, years ago. P R O L O G U E 1976 2 F R I T Z LANG Eisenstein, Bunuel, Hitchcock, and others, the new filmmaking generation of Truffaut and Godard—all lionized him, emulated him, stole from him. The director's career spanned fifty years, from the early silent era to the French nouvelle vague. A handful of his titles had become acknowledged as classics, their prints held in museum collections. But Fritz Lang guided his last motion picture in 1960, and for the last sixteen years he had lived like a ghost in his Summit Ridge house, on a hill high above Hollywood. Lang liked to sit in the living room of his home in his favorite chair, an inch or two away from the television set, holding up to the screen a enlarging magnifying glass—a parody of the famous monocle. One eye was blackpatched at the end; the other, though almost worthless, peered through the enlarging lens at the screen. In the early 1970s, Lang was watching the same thing on television as everybody else in the United States. He watched Watergate unfold, cursing Nixon. He liked to pass the time watching the situation comedies, the cornpone "Green Acres" or, later on in time, the saucier "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." Born in Vienna, a German citizen at hisprofessional height, in the end Lang wanted nothing more than to be an American. Lang always kept his journal close at hand; his beloved wooden monkey sitting next to him. A clock ticked somewhere in the house. The only other regular presence in the house was an enigmatic woman who might or might not be the director's wife. Whenever Lang heard her, scraping a pan in the kitchen, he shrieked that she was interrupting his concentration. When he felt like it, he carried on a conversation with the monkey. He kept meticulous notes about his daily life in his journal, though no longer did he write down ideas, as once he had done obsessively,for his next project: Ein Film von Fritz Lang. Retirement had rewarded him with ample...

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