Vienna-born Fritz Lang, while recovering from his…

Vienna-born Fritz Lang, while recovering from his war injuries and shell shock in 1916, had written some scenarios and ideas for films.

Discharged from the Austrian army with the rank of lieutenant in 1918, he had done some acting in the Viennese theater circuit for a short time before being hired as a writer at Decla, Erich Pommer's Berlin-based production company.

His writing stint was brief, as Lang had soon started to work as a director at the German film studio Ufa, and later Nero-Film, just as the Expressionist movement was building.

In this first phase of his career, Lang had alternated between art films such as Der Müde Tod (Destiny, literally "Tired Death") and populist thrillers such as Die Spinnen (Spiders), combining popular genres with Expressionist techniques to create an unprecedented synthesis of popular entertainment with art cinema.

In 1920, he had met his future wife, the writer and actress Thea von Harbou.

She and Lang would cowrite all of his movies from 1921 through 1933, including 1922's Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse the Gambler), which ran for four hours in two parts in the original version and was the first in the Dr. Mabuse trilogy, 1924's Die Nibelungen, the famed 1927 masterpiece Metropolis (the world's most expensive silent film at the time of its release).

Set in a futuristic urban dystopia, the groundbreaking Metropolis examines a common science fiction theme of the day: the social crisis between workers and owners in capitalism.

The film stars Alfred Abel as the leader of the city, Gustav Fröhlich as his son, who tries to mediate between the elite caste and the workers, Brigitte Helm as both the pure-at-heart worker Maria and the debased robot version of her, and Rudolf Klein-Rogge as the mad scientist who created the robot.