Looking at the official record, pioneering German director Fritz Lang had a hard life. Lang lost his first wife to suicide and his second to the Nazis, who, despite his Jewish mother, offered him the position of head filmmaker for the state—thereby forcing him to flee the country. Once established in Hollywood, Lang had to fight the rigid studio system for the sake of his art, and, in a bitter coincidence, was later persecuted by the American government for suspected Communism. McGilligan's fascinating biography, very much of the warts-and-all variety, questions that official record, most notably regarding Lang's history-shrouded early days. Born in Vienna, Lang drifted through the army and several other professions before settling on filmmaking in Germany. The apparent suicide of his wife took place early in his career, and it is this mysterious event—all that is known is that she died of a bullet from the director's gun, with only Lang and his then-mistress present—that the author presents as coloring the director's suicide- and murder-filled work. Though McGilligan refrains from drawing any conclusions, others do, and it is plainly suggested that whatever did happen wasn't on the police report. Of course, if Lang had been linked to his wife's death, the world would have been deprived of such early cinematic masterpieces as the visionary Metropolis and the sinister and perceptive M. These two films, and most of Lang's other German work, are still considered among the finest produced by that country, and they made Lang the most famous German director of his day. No wonder, then, that Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's film-minded propaganda minister, approached Lang with the idea of making him head of German filmmaking in 1933. Whether or not, as Lang liked to tell it years later, this led to his immediate, suspense-filled flight is the second major factor of the Lang myth with which The Nature Of The Beast takes issue. Introducing a good deal of convincing evidence, McGilligan suggests that the flirtation between Goebbels and the director might have been two-sided, and Lang's decision to leave Germany a good deal more protracted. Nonetheless, Lang did flee, to Hollywood by way of Paris. It's at this point that McGilligan's biography ceases to rely heavily on speculation and begins to draw from the numerous eyewitness accounts of Lang's co-workers. Already known for driving actors to extremes—the scene of Brigitte Helm being burned at the stake in Metropolis was achieved by having Helm tied to a stake, with Lang himself lighting the fire—Lang's tyrannical perfectionism alienated everyone from Henry Fonda to Marlene Dietrich. McGilligan's Lang emerges as an often-unpleasant, always-driven man, but, as the author and his sources fully concede, the films speak for themselves. Except for a handful of Hollywood failures, the director—who once nearly drove his staff mad by insisting on filming a shot over the shoulder of an out-of-season insect—produced interesting and often great films for over four decades. By making the great artist and the impossible man seem like the same person and not irresolvable halves, McGilligan's thoroughly researched, sharply written book does his subject justice.