Lizzie Andrew Borden 1860 – 1927 RIP

Lizzie Andrew Borden (July 19, 1860 – June 1, 1927) was a New England spinster who was the central figure in the hatchet murders of her father and stepmother on August 4, 1892 in Fall River, Massachusetts in the United States. The murders, subsequent trial, and following trial by media became a cause célèbre. The fame of the incident has endured in American pop culture and criminology. Although Lizzie Borden was acquitted, no one else was ever arrested or tried, and she has remained notorious in American folklore. Dispute over the identity of the killer or killers continues to this day.

During the morning of August 4, 1892, Borden's father, Andrew Jackson Borden, and her stepmother, Abby Durfee Borden, were murdered in the family home. The only other people present at the residence at the time were Lizzie and the family maid, Bridget Sullivan. Emma Borden, Lizzie's sister, was away from home. The Borden sisters' uncle, John Vinnicum Morse, brother of Andrew Borden's first wife, was visiting at the time, but was also away from the house during the time of the murders.

That day, Andrew Borden had gone into town to do his usual rounds at the bank and post office. He returned home at about 10:45 a.m. About a half-hour later, Lizzie Borden found his body. According to Sullivan's testimony, she was lying down in her room on the third floor of the house shortly after 11:00 a.m. when she heard Lizzie call to her, saying someone had killed her father, whose body was found slumped on a couch in the downstairs sitting room. Andrew Borden's face was turned to the right hand side, apparently at ease as if he were asleep.

Shortly thereafter, while Lizzie Borden was being tended by neighbors and the family doctor, Sullivan discovered the body of Mrs. Borden upstairs in the guest bedroom. Mr. and Mrs. Borden had both been killed by blows from a hatchet, which in the case of Andrew Borden, not only crushed his skull but cleanly split his left eyeball.

Over a period of years after the death of the first Mrs. Borden, life at 92 Second Street had grown unpleasant in many ways, and affection between the older and younger family members had waned considerably if any was present at all. The upstairs floor of the house was divided. The front was the territory of the Borden sisters, while the rear was for Mr. and Mrs. Borden. Meals were not always eaten together. Conflict had increased between the two daughters and their father about his decision to divide valuable property among relatives before his death. Relatives of their stepmother had been given a house, and John Morse, brother to the deceased Sarah Borden (the mother of the Borden daughters), had come to visit that week. His visit was to facilitate transfer of farm property, which included what had been a summer home for the Borden daughters. Shortly before the murders, a major argument had occurred which resulted in both sisters leaving home on extended "vacations." Lizzie Borden, however, decided to end her trip and returned early.

She was refused the purchase of prussic acid (hydrogen cyanide) by local druggist Eli Bence, which she claimed was for cleaning a seal skin coat.

Shortly before the murders, the entire household became violently ill. As Mr. Borden was not a popular man in town, Mrs. Borden feared they were being poisoned, but the family doctor diagnosed it as bad food.

Lizzie Borden was arrested on August 11, 1892, with her trial beginning ten months later in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Her stories proved to be inconsistent, and her behavior suspect. She was tried for the murders, defended by former Massachusetts Governor George D. Robinson and Andrew V. Jennings. One of the prosecutors in the trial was William H. Moody, future United States Attorney General and Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

1893 trial juryDuring the police investigation, a hatchet was found in the basement and was assumed to be the murder weapon. Though it was clean, most of its handle was missing and the prosecution stated that it had been broken off because it was covered with blood. However, police officer Michael Mullaly stated that he found it next to a hatchet handle. Deputy Marshall John Fleet contradicted this testimony. Later a forensics expert said there was no time for the hatchet to be cleaned after the murder. The prosecution was hampered by the fact that the Fall River police did not put credence in the new forensic technology of fingerprinting, and refused to take prints on the hatchet.

No blood-soaked clothing was found as evidence by police. A few days after the murder, Borden tore apart and burned a blue dress in the kitchen stove, claiming she had brushed against fresh baseboard paint which had smeared on it.

Despite incriminating circumstances, Lizzie Borden was acquitted on June 20, 1893 by a jury after an hour and a half's deliberation. The fact that no murder weapon was found and no blood evidence was noted just a few minutes after the second murder pointed to reasonable doubt. Her entire original inquest testimony was barred from the trial. Also excluded was testimony regarding her attempt to purchase prussic acid. Adding to the doubt was another axe murder in the area, perpetrated by José Correira, which took place shortly before the trial. While many details were similar, Correira was not in the country when the Borden murder took place.

After the trial Borden and her sister moved to a new house called Maplecroft. In June 1905, the two argued over a party Lizzie gave for Nance O'Neil and a group of actors. Shortly after that, Emma moved out of the house, and Lizzie Borden began using the name "Lizbeth A. Borden."

Lizzie Borden died of pneumonia on June 1, 1927 in Fall River, Massachusetts. The funeral details were not made public and few people attended her burial. Borden was buried in Oak Grove Cemetery under the name "Lizbeth Andrew Borden", her footstone reading "Lizbeth". Her will, probated on June 25, 1927, left $30,000 to the Fall River Animal Rescue League. She also left $500 in perpetual trust for the care of her father's grave. Nine days later, her estranged sister, Emma Lenora Borden, died from a fall in Newmarket, New Hampshire, on June 10, 1927.

The house on Second Street where the murders occurred is now a bed and breakfast. Maplecroft, the mansion Borden bought after her acquittal, on then-fashionable French Street in the "highlands" is privately owned, and only occasionally available for touring.

Several theories have been presented over the years suggesting Lizzie Borden may not have committed the murders, and that other suspects may have had possible motives. One theory is that the maid, Bridget Sullivan, did it; possibly out of outrage for being asked to clean the windows, a taxing job on a hot day, just a day after having suffered from food poisoning. Another potential culprit was forwarded by Arnold R. Brown in his work, Lizzie Borden: The Legend, The Truth, The Final Chapter, in which Brown theorizes that the true culprit was an illegitimate paternal half-brother named William Borden, as a revenge killing in his failed efforts to extort money from his father.

Yet another theory is that Borden suffered petit mal epileptic seizures during her menstrual cycle, at which times she entered a dream-like state, and unknowingly committed the murders.

The book Lizzie by Evan Hunter posed the theory that Lizzie Borden had an affair with the actress Nance O'Neil, whom she met in Boston in 1904. In the early 20th century, it was still considered socially unacceptable for women to become actresses. O'Neil was a spendthrift, always in financial trouble, and Borden came from a wealthy background. The two got along, despite Borden's notoriety.

While there has never been any significant evidence that the two were intimate, the friendship was cited as the cause of Borden's final separation from her sister, Emma. O'Neil was later a character in the musical about Lizzie Borden, entitled Lizzie Borden: A Musical Tragedy in Two Axe, where she was played by Suellen Vance. Feminist Carolyn Gage refers to O'Neil as an overt lesbian, and although there are few documented details of any affairs, Gage claimed that her sexual orientation was well known in entertainment circles, despite her marriage.

The trial received a tremendous amount of national publicity. It has been compared to the later trials of Bruno Hauptmann, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and O.J. Simpson as a landmark in media coverage of legal proceedings.

The case was memorialized in a popular jump-rope rhyme:

Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.

The anonymous rhyme was made up by a writer as an alluring little tune to sell newspapers even though in reality her stepmother suffered 18 or 19 blows, her father 11. Though acquitted for the crimes, Lizzie Borden was ostracized by neighbors following the trial. Lizzie Borden's name was again brought to the public forefront when she was accused of shoplifting in 1897.

Borden was distantly related to the American milk processor Gail Borden (1801–1874) and Robert Borden (1854–1937), Canada's Prime Minister during World War I.

Elizabeth Montgomery and Lizzie Borden were sixth cousins once removed, both descending from 17th-century Massachusetts resident John Luther. Rhonda McClure, the genealogist who documented the Montgomery-Borden connection, said, "I wonder how Elizabeth would have felt if she knew she was playing her own cousin."

Borden and culture

Morton Gould wrote a ballet on the subject of Lizzie Borden, Fall River Legend, which premiered in a production by Ballet Theatre at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City on April 22, 1948 with Alicia Alonso in the lead role. He later abridged the music into a suite which is the more commonly performed version. Choreography by Agnes de Mille.

Nashville Ballet premiered Lizzie in October 2006 with choreography by Paul Vasterling, set to Fall River Legend. His interpretation investigates allegations of sexual abuse as the motive for the murder.

Rick Geary used the device of a fictional journal written by a Fall River contemporary of Lizzie as the basis of his comic book The Borden Tragedy: A Memoir of the Infamous Double Murder at Fall River, Massachusetts, 1892. NY: NBN Pub., 1997. It was an entry in his series A Treasury of Victorian Murder.

The regularly published newsletter: The Lizzie Borden Quarterly featured a comic strip titled Princess Maplecroft.

Borden was the topic of The Chad Mitchell Trio's aptly named "Lizzie Borden/You Can't Chop Your Poppa Up in Massachusetts." It was written by Michael Brown for New Faces of 1952.

She was the subject of the operas Lizzie Borden (1965) by Jack Beeson and Lizbeth by Thomas Albert.

She was the subject of the cockney knees-up style song "Oh, Mother Borden" by late 80s UK musical satirists The Dubious Brothers.

The song "She Took An Axe" by the thrash metal band Flotsam and Jetsam tells Borden's story, portraying her as a demon-inspired woman, treating the subject with humour.

American glam metal band Lizzy Borden is named after her.

Melora Creager, of Rasputina, wrote her first song at the age of six, which was called "Ballad of Lizzie Borden"

Angela Carter wrote two short stories about Borden, one entitled Lizzie's Tiger is about a trip to the circus as a young girl, the other, The Fall River Axe Murders, focuses on the events leading up to the murders.

Evan Hunter (aka Ed McBain) wrote a fictional account of the murder in his book Lizzie.

Elizabeth Engstrom wrote a novel titled Lizzie Borden, published by Tor Books in 1981. Most of the known facts of Borden's life are integrated into the fictional tale.

In Maxine O'Callaghan's short story, "An Insignificant Crime", a shopkeeper and his son-in-law debate whether or not to stop the young lady who comes to the store and steals small items, because her father is so influential. They decide not to stop her shoplifting that day. In the final lines it is revealed that the shoplifter's name is Miss Borden, and that the small item she chose to steal on this day was an axe.

The radio anthology series Suspense aired adaptations of the Borden story twice, once as "The Fall River Tragedy" on January 14, 1952, and once as "Goodbye, Miss Lizzie Borden" on October 4, 1955. Other radio adaptations include "Crime Classics: The Bloody Bloody Banks Of Fall River" from 1953, CBS radio's "Second Look At Murder", and "Unsolved Mysteries: Lizzie Borden".

An episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents entitled "The Older Sister" retold the Borden story, in which Emma had murdered her parents due to a mental illness she suffered, while Lizzie covered for her.

Armstrong Circle Theatre, Season 12, Episode 1, "Legend of Murder – The Untold Story of Lizzie Borden" (first aired October 11, 1961), was a dramatization of Edward D. Radin's book Lizzie Borden: The Untold Story (Simon and Schuster, 1961), which put forth the theory that Bridget Sullivan was the actual murderess. Lizzie was played by Clarice Blackburn, Bridget by Mary Doyle.

Elizabeth Montgomery depicted Borden in William Bast's two hour television movie, The Legend of Lizzie Borden (1975). In the movie, Lizzie Borden performs the murders after stripping naked (thus explaining the lack of bloodstained clothing).

The Sci-Fi Channel Ghost Hunters "TAPS" team investigated the Lizzie Borden house for paranormal activity in episode 12 of season 2.

On January 23, 2007, the Crime & Investigation Network aired a documentary on the Lizzie Borden story.

In 2004, the Discovery Channel aired an investigative documentary called Lizzie Borden Had an Axe. In the episode, a pair of detectives used modern forensics to exonerate Sullivan and prove Lizzie could have been the killer.

In 2008, The History Channel's series MonsterQuest visited the Borden home looking for ghosts.

The Travel Channel's show Scariest Places on Earth featured the Borden home as the #1 most scary place on earth.

The Lizzie Borden Minis is a series of short documentaries produced by Garden Bay Films and filmed at 92 Second Street where the Borden murders occurred in 1892.

The anthology of short plays, "Sepia and Song", contained a play called "A Memory of Lizzie," with scenes from Lizzie Borden's childhood interpersed with quotes from her trial.

Blood Relations by Sharon Pollock premiered at Theatre Tree, Edmonton Canada in 1980. The play is set in 1902, with its "dream thesis" set in 1892, at Fall River, Massachusetts. It explores the events leading up to the trial.

The Testimony of Lizzie Borden by Eric Stedman, a docudrama staged in an accurate reproduction of the Borden sitting room which re-created much of Lizzie's actual inquest testimony, premiered at Theatre on the Towpath in New Hope, Pa. in 1994 and was presented in Fall River in 1995.

Lizzie Borden's Tempest by Brendan Byrnes played the New York International Fringe Festival in 1998. As Lizzie reads the role of Miranda in The Tempest with her local theatre club, Shakespeare's storm resurrects and reunites the Borden Family. The play's central idea is based on an actual program displayed at the Fall River Historical Society that lists a "Miss Borden" playing the role of Miranda in The Tempest.

Lizzie Borden, a rock musical adaptation of Lizzie's story created by Tim Maner, Steven Cheslik-deMeyer, and Alan Stevens Hewitt, will be produced by Took An Axe Productions in New York, NY, Sept 10-Oct 17, 2009, at The Living Theatre. This version assumes Lizzie's guilt and explores the events leading up to the murders and the trial.

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Brittany Murphy 1977-2009 RIP

Brittany Murphy (November 10, 1977 – December 20, 2009) was an American actress and singer.

She starred in films such as Clueless, Girl, Interrupted, 8 Mile, Sin City and Riding in Cars with Boys, and performed vocals on a range of films and with dance musician Paul Oakenfold, together garnering a number one dance music hit in the United States in 2006.

Brittany Murphy was born in Atlanta, Georgia on November 10, 1977. Her parents, Sharon Murphy and Angelo Bertolotti, divorced when she was two years old, and Murphy was raised by her mother, in Edison, New Jersey, and later in Los Angeles,[where they moved so Murphy could pursue an acting career. Murphy said her mother never tried to stifle her creativity, and she considered her mother a crucial factor in her later success: "When I asked my mom to move to California, she sold everything and move out here for me. ... She always believed in me." Murphy's mother is of Irish and Eastern European descent and her father is Italian American. She was raised a Baptist and later became a non-denominational Christian.

Murphy landed her first job in Hollywood when she was age 14, starring as Brenda Drexell in the series Drexell's Class. She then went on to play Molly Morgan in the short-lived The Torkelsons spinoff Almost Home. Murphy also guest-starred on several television series including Parker Lewis Can't Lose, Blossom, and Frasier. She also had recurring roles on Sister, Sister; Party of Five; and Boy Meets World. In 1997, she began voicing the character of Luanne Platter (as well as the younger version of Joseph Gribble) on the long-running animated series King of the Hill.

Murphy starred in many successful films, including Clueless (1995); Girl, Interrupted (1999); Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999); Don't Say a Word (2001); the TV adaption of the novel The Devil's Arithmetic (2001); 8 Mile (2002) and Uptown Girls (2003) as well as many lesser-known films, such as Spun (2003). In 2004, she starred in the romantic comedy Little Black Book, and the critically acclaimed Sin City (2005). She starred in two Edward Burns films: Sidewalks of New York (2002) and The Groomsmen (2006). In 2009, she was cast in the Lifetime TV movie, Tribute, as the main character, Cilla. She was set to appear in the Sylvester Stallone film, The Expendables, which will be released in 2010.

On June 6, 2006, Murphy and Paul Oakenfold released the single "Faster Kill Pussycat", from the album A Lively Mind. The song became a club hit, and hit number one on Billboard's Hot Dance Club Play chart. It also hit number seven in the UK singles chart in June 2006.

She dabbled in music again with the release of the film Happy Feet, in which she covered Queen's "Somebody to Love" and Earth, Wind & Fire's "Boogie Wonderland".

In late 2002, Murphy began dating Ashton Kutcher, her co-star in Just Married. Once engaged to talent manager Jeff Kwatinetz, Murphy became engaged to Joe Macaluso in December 2005, a production assistant she met while working on the film Little Black Book. In August 2006, they ended their engagement. In May 2007, Murphy married British screenwriter Simon Monjack in a private Jewish ceremony.

In 2005, Murphy signed as the spokesmodel for Jordache jeans. In 2006, Murphy was voted 36th in FHM's 100 Sexiest Women List, and in May of the same year, Maxim named Murphy #49 on its annual Hot 100 List.

At 8 a.m. on December 20, 2009, the Los Angeles Fire Department responded to "a medical request" at the Los Angeles home Murphy and Monjack shared. She had apparently collapsed in a bathroom. Firefighters attempted to resuscitate Murphy on the scene and she was subsequently transported to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead on arrival at 10:04 a.m. after going into cardiac arrest.

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The Dead Girl is a 2006 film written and directed by Karen Moncrieff starring Toni Collette, Brittany Murphy and Marcia Gay Harden. The film was nominated for several 2007 Independent Spirit Awards awards including Best Feature and Best Director. The story revolves around the death of a young woman (played by Murphy) and the characters linked to her murder.

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Poe inspired Artwork from CapricornArtist73

ALIEN Screenwriter Dan O'Bannon 1946-2009 RIP

Daniel Thomas O'Bannon (September 30, 1946 – December 17, 2009) was a motion picture screenwriter, director and occasional actor, usually in the science fiction and horror genres.

When O'Bannon was in USC, he met John Carpenter and they collaborated on the 45-minute USC School of Cinema-Television short Dark Star (1970). Carpenter expanded the short into a feature which was released in 1974 with a final budget of only US$60,000. O'Bannon was along, serving in a number of capacities, including scripting, editing and acting as one of the leading roles (Pinback). In 1975 Dark Star won the Golden Scroll award (as the Saturn Awards were known in the early years) for Best Special Effects.

O'Bannon, growing up a sci-fi and horror enthusiast, had abandoned technical work (including a stint as a computer animator on George Lucas' classic Star Wars) for screenwriting. Following Star Wars he was attached to supervise special effects for a Alejandro Jodorowsky production of Frank Herbert's Dune but this fell apart in 1975 leaving O'Bannon homeless and with no money. Together with Ronald Shusett, he wrote the original story for Alien (1979), regathered the artistic talent from the defunct Dune project and is generally acknowledged (along with H. R. Giger and Ridley Scott) as being one of the main creative forces behind Alien's success.

O'Bannon has voiced his displeasure with his next big-budget outing, John Badham's Blue Thunder (1983), an action yarn about a Los Angeles helicopter surveillance team. Originally written with Don Jakoby, Blue Thunder also underwent extensive rewriting, losing some of its political content. He and Jakoby also scripted Lifeforce (1985); a tale directed by Tobe Hooper, that veers from alien visitation to vampirism to an apocalyptic ending. It was not well-received and was considered a box office flop. O'Bannon would again collaborate with Jakoby and Hooper for the 1986 remake Invaders from Mars. Purists considered it inferior to the 1950s original and it also performed poorly at the box office.

Also in 1985, O'Bannon moved into the director's chair with Return of the Living Dead. The film met with success and went on to spawn numerous sequels, not unlike the earlier Alien.

He and Shusett would reteam on Total Recall (1990), an adaptation of the classic Philip K. Dick short story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale". This was a project the two had been working on since collaborating on Alien. The film went on to earn well over US$100 million. An earlier screenplay by the duo titled Hemoglobin was also produced as the low budget feature Bleeders (1997).

His second directorial feature, The Resurrected (1992), was a low budget horror effort that was released directly on video and focused on a family's ancient rituals which awaken the dead. It was based on the writings of H. P. Lovecraft.

O'Bannon also received a co-writing credit on the film Screamers (1995), a science fiction film about post-apocalyptic robots programmed to kill. Adapted from the Philip K. Dick story "Second Variety", O'Bannon did his work on the screenplay in the early 1980s.

1974 Dark Star – writer, special effects, editor, production design, co-star
1977 Star Wars – special computer effects
1979 Alien – writer
1981 Dead & Buried – writer
1981 Heavy Metal – writer of two segments, Soft Landing and B-17
1983 Blue Thunder – writer
1985 Lifeforce – writer
1985 The Return of the Living Dead – writer, director, voice
1986 Invaders from Mars – writer
1990 Total Recall – writer
1992 The Resurrected – director
1995 Screamers – writer
2010 Silvaticus 3015 – co-screenplay writer

O'Bannon is the writer of the influential story "The Long Tomorrow", illustrated by Jean Giraud. This particular piece is the main graphical influence on Blade Runner.

At the time of his death, O’Bannon was working on a prequel to “Alien” to be released in 2011.

He was married to Diane Louise Lindley from January 18, 1986 until his death in Los Angeles on December 17, 2009. He is survived by their son Adam.

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Happy Birthday Fritz Lang

Friedrich "Fritz" Christian Anton Lang (December 5, 1890 – August 2, 1976) was an Austrian-German-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor. One of the best known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute. His most famous films are the groundbreaking Metropolis (the world's most expensive silent film at the time of its release) and M, made before he moved to the United States, where he contributed greatly to film noir.

Friedrich "Fritz" Lang was born in Vienna on December 5, 1890, in what was then Austria-Hungary, to Anton Lang (August 1, 1860, Vienna – February 28, 1940, Gars/Kamp) of Moravian descent, an architect and construction company manager, and Pauline "Paula" Schlesinger (July 26, 1864, Brünn – 1920, Manigfall) also from Moravia, as the second of 2 sons. His elder brother Adolf was nearly 7 years older. Both his father and his mother were practicing Roman Catholics, although his mother had been born Jewish and converted to Catholicism when her younger son was 10 years old. Paula Lang died from complications of breast cancer in 1920. Lang himself was baptized at the Schottenkirche in Vienna.

After finishing high school, Lang briefly attended the Technical University of Vienna, where he studied civil engineering and eventually switched to art. In 1910 he left Vienna to see the world, traveling throughout Europe and Africa and later Asia and the Pacific area. In 1913, he studied painting in Paris, France. The next year, he returned home to Vienna at the outbreak of the First World War. In January 1914, he was drafted into service in the Austrian army and fought in Russia and Romania during World War I, where he was wounded three times.

While recovering from his injuries and shell shock in 1916, he wrote some scenarios and ideas for films. He was discharged from the army with the rank of lieutenant in 1918 and did 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 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 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 met his future wife, the writer and actress Thea von Harbou. She and Lang co-wrote 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, and the 1931 classic, M, his first "talking" picture.

Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou in their Berlin flat, 1923 or 1924Although some consider Lang's work to be simple melodrama, he produced a coherent oeuvre that helped to establish the characteristics of film noir, with its recurring themes of psychological conflict, paranoia, fate and moral ambiguity. His work influenced filmmakers as disparate as Jacques Rivette and William Friedkin. In 1931, between Woman in the Moon and Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, Lang directed what many film scholars consider to be his masterpiece: M, a disturbing story of a child murderer (Peter Lorre in his first starring role) who is hunted down and brought to rough justice by Berlin's criminal underworld. M remains a powerful work; it was remade in 1951 by Joseph Losey, but this version had little impact on audiences, and has become harder to see than the original film. Lang epitomized the stereotype of the tyrannical German film director such as Erich von Stroheim and Otto Preminger; he was known for being hard to work with. During the climactic final scene in M, he allegedly threw Peter Lorre down a flight of stairs in order to give more authenticity to Lorre's battered look. He even wore a monocle that added to the stereotype.

Upon his arrival in Hollywood, Lang joined the MGM studio and directed the crime drama Fury. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1939. Lang made twenty-one features in the next twenty-one years, working in a variety of genres at every major studio in Hollywood, occasionally producing his films as an independent. These films, often compared unfavourably by contemporary critics to Lang's earlier works, have since been reevaluated as being integral to the emergence and evolution of American genre cinema, film noir in particular.

During the 1950s, Lang found it harder to find congenial production conditions in Hollywood and his advancing age left him less inclined to grapple with American backers. The German producer, Artur Brauner, was expressing interest in remaking not only The Indian Tomb (a story that Lang had developed in the twenties that was ultimately taken from him by studio heads and directed instead by Joe May) but also Lang's earlier Doctor Mabuse pictures. Fearing that Brauner would proceed with or without his assent, Lang abandoned his plans for retirement and returned to Germany in order to make his Indian Epic, which is regarded as a masterpiece by a number of film scholars today. Following the production, Brauner was ready to proceed with his remake of Das Testament des Doctor Mabuse when Lang approached him with the idea of adding another original film to the series. The result was The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), made in a hurry and with a relatively small budget. It can be viewed as the marriage between the director's early experiences with expressionist techniques in Germany as well as the spartan style already visible in his late American work. Lang was approaching blindness during the production, making it his final project.

One of his most famous film noirs is the police drama The Big Heat (1953), noted for its uncompromising brutality, especially for a scene in which Lee Marvin throws scalding coffee on Gloria Grahame's face. During this period, his visual style simplified (owing in part to the constraints of the Hollywood studio system) and his worldview became increasingly pessimistic, culminating in the cold, geometric style of his last American films, While the City Sleeps (1956) and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1957).

Many of the rumors about Lang's life and career are hard to verify. The most famous rumor is that Joseph Goebbels called Lang to his offices for a meeting in which he gave Lang two pieces of news. The first was that his most recent film, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, 1933) was being banned as an incitement to public disorder. The second was that he was nevertheless so impressed by Lang's abilities as a filmmaker, he was offering Lang a position as the head of German film studio UFA. Lang had been, unbeknownst to Goebbels, already planning to leave Germany for Paris, but the meeting with Goebbels ran so long that the banks were closed by the time it finished, and Lang fled that night without his money, not to return until after the war.

The problem is that many portions of the story cannot be checked, and of those that can, most are contradicted by the evidence: Lang actually left Germany with most of his money, unlike most refugees, and made several return trips later in the same year. There were, of course, no witnesses to the meeting besides Goebbels and Lang, but Goebbels's appointment books, when they refer to the meeting, mention only the banning of Testament. No evidence has been discovered in any of Goebbels's writings to affirm the suggestion that he was planning to offer Lang any position. Jean-Luc Godard's film Contempt (1963), in which Lang appeared as himself, presents a bare outline of the story as fact.

Whatever the truth of this story, it is known that Lang did in fact leave Germany in 1934 and moved to Paris, where he filmed a version of Ferenc Molnar's Liliom, starring Charles Boyer. This was Lang's only film in French (not counting the French version of Testament). He then went to the United States. Lang's wife Thea von Harbou, who had started to sympathize with the Nazis in the early 1930s and joined the Nazi party (the NSDAP) in 1932, stayed behind. The two were divorced in 1933.

While his career had ended without fanfare, his American and later German works were championed by the critics of the Cahiers du cinéma. Lang died in 1976 and was interred in the Forest Lawn - Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles.