In the mid-1930s, Fritz Lang fled Hitler and left a successful film career in Germany behind to come to America. After a 20 year career in Hollywood, Lang went back to a much-changed Germany to make two films that he had first developed in the 1920s, set in India but largely cast with non-Indian performers in brownface. Even Lang’s collaborators were concerned that these films, The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb, were politically incorrect and out-of-date. How did the director behind some of the most influential films ever made end up here, and how can we understand his late movies – and his appearance as himself in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt – as the culmination of all that came before?

(00:00) Fritz Lang

(05:30) Femmes Fatale

(15:28) Was Lang Blacklisted?

(23:15) Marlene Dietrich and Baseball

(30:40) Newspaper Noir

(41:42) Fetishizing India in Post-Nazi Germany

(51:30) A World-Class Troll

(01:02:03) The Return of Mabuse

(01:09:22) Lang and Godard

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