“Directors who don’t drink, the day they drink will be the day they’ll make the best film in the world.”
Considered one of the all-time masters, in his era, Fritz Lang was rivaled only by Hitchcock and Hawks. Born in Vienna, Lang was seriously wounded while serving in the Austrian army during World War I. Discharged in 1918, he directed his first film, Harakiri, one year later. Lang quickly established himself internationally with a unique style that combined German Expressionist visuals with genre storytelling; this later proved to be the primary antecedent of and influence on film noir. His science-fiction epic, Metropolis (1927), was one of the most expensive silent films ever made. Lang’s first talkie, M (1931)—his masterpiece—is considered the progenitor of the “psycho-killer” genre. Supposedly brutal to his actors, legend has it Lang tossed Peter Lorre down a flight of stairs before the final scene of M to make him appear properly battered. Lang left Germany in 1933, and over the next twenty years, he toyed with nearly every genre in Hollywood: Westerns, noir, costume dramas, even musicals. Highlights: Fury (1936), Ministry of Fear (1944), and especially The Big Heat (1953). He returned to Germany in late 1950s, making three final films before failing eyesight forced his retirement in 1960. Embraced by new wave filmmakers worldwide, Lang’s cinematic swan song was playing a winking version of himself in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963).
HERE’S YOUR REAL SCOOP, he insisted: my martinis. In the mid-1970s, American writer Charlotte Chandler was interviewing director Fritz Lang for her biography of Marlene Dietrich, whom the legendary filmmaker had directed in the Western Rancho Notorious and whose company he’d enjoyed, both sexually and otherwise, decades earlier.
Chandler wanted to talk about Dietrich, but Lang kept pushing his damn martinis. He had a unique recipe, he told her conspiratorially: Tanqueray gin, Noilly Prat vermouth—real Noilly Prat, he emphasized—and a secret ingredient that, when mixed with the gin and vermouth, caused a chemical reaction that turned the drink a deep shade of blue.
That was the best part: It was a blue martini.
Making a blue martini for a woman was, Lang alleged, a foolproof path to seduction. When he fell in love with someone, he’d ask her if she’d ever had a blue martini, and naturally, she would reply that she hadn’t. “She would be mystified, intrigued, enchanted, and fall into my arms,” he told Chandler.
To be clear, like W. C. Fields before him, Lang was a historically staunch advocate of all forms of the martini, blue or otherwise. He’d drink them any time of day. As a young vagabond in Paris, he’d order one at a café (paying for it with money he earned selling postcard-size sketches), down half of it, complain that it wasn’t dry enough, then receive another full one for free.
Making a blue martini for a woman was, Lang alleged, a foolproof path to seduction.
Later, in his Beverly Hills mansion, Lang hung a mural he painted of topless women dancing out of a martini glass. One of the most charming virtues of Gloria Grahame’s character in The Big Heat is her ability to mix a perfect martini. Many film directors had their own peculiar recipes (Hitchcock: “Five parts gin and a quick glance at a vermouth bottle”), but Lang’s blue martini became legendary—mostly because it combined Lang’s three greatest loves: martinis, women, and mystery.
Lang once said he didn’t consider Don Juan a philanderer so much as a perfectionist. During his time in Hollywood, Lang had affairs with (among others) Miriam Hopkins, Kay Francis, Joan Bennett, and Dietrich, with whom he had an extreme love-hate relationship. Dietrich found him arrogant and impatient (as did most); he found her annoying, particularly her habit on set of invoking “what von Sternberg would do.”
Sometime in the late thirties the pair had a brief fling, which lasted about same amount of time it took for Dietrich to reach across the pillow and phone another man. Yet despite his icy demeanor—so cruel, the joke went, that he could only achieve orgasm with the taste of blood in his mouth—Lang had established himself as a ladies’ man, and he credited much of his success to his trademark blue martini. “It was the greatest seduction technique,” he told Chandler. The third ingredient was classified, he’d often demur, but the American writer dragged the secret chemical out of him at long last. Food coloring.
Upon hearing this, Chandler proposed her own theory about the drink’s powers of seduction: perhaps it wasn’t the martini or its blueness that was irresistible to these women, but the man mixing them. Perhaps Lang himself was the blue martini. Lang considered this for a long moment, and then responded with a question of his own.
“Would you like a blue martini?”
