Year: Day to Day Men: March 27
The Slithering Snake
The twenty-seventh of March in 1902 marks the birth date of Charles Bryant Lang Jr., one of the outstanding cinematographers of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Modest and yet a perfectionist, he spent the majority of his career at Paramount Studios where he contributed to its reputation for visual style.
Born in Bluff, Utah, Charles Lang studied law at the University of Southern California, but soon joined his father, photographic technician Charles Bryant Lang Sr., at an East Los Angeles film laboratory in 1918. Lang apprenticed as a laboratory assistant and still photographer before becoming an assistant cameraman. He worked with cinematographers Harry Kinley Martin and Lesley Guy Wilky who often collaborated with William C. DeMille. Quickly promoted, Lang soon worked with William DeMille and, later, followed him to Paramount Studios.
In 1929, Lang became a full director of photography at Paramount Studios. He was part of a team of cinematographers working at the studio that included such craftsmen as Victor Milner, Karl Struss and Lee Garmes. At this time, Paramount dominated the Academy Awards for cinematography, especially in the genre of black and white romantic and period film. The style of lighting that Lang introduced in Fred Borzage’s 1932 “A Farewell to Arms” became heavily identified with all of Paramount’s films during the 1930s and 1940s.
Charles Lang excelled in the use of chiaroscuro, light and shade, and was adept at creating a mood for every genre. His film work in this period included Henry Hathaway’s 1935 drama-fantasy “Peter Ibbetson”. Frank Borzage’s 1936 comedy drama “Desire” with Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper, and Mitchell Leisen’s 1939 screwball comedy “Midnight”, scripted by Billy Wilder and starring Claudette Colbert and Don Ameche. Lang was especially appreciated by female stars, such as Dietrich, Hepburn and Helen Hayes, due to his ability to photograph them to their best advantage, often with subdued lighting and diffusion techniques.
Lang’s lighting effects adapted perfectly to the expressionist neo-realism of the 1950s film noir. His expert techniques strongly contributed to the mood in such films as Billy Wilder’s 1939 “Ace in the Hole” with Kirk Douglas as the exploitive newspaper reporter, and Sydney Boehm’s 1953 crime drama “Big Heat” with Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame. The success of such films as the 1954 “Sabrina” and the 1959 “Some Like It Hot”, all nominees for Lang’s cinematography, owed much of their success to his camera work.
Though he preferred black and white photography, Lang became equally proficient in color photography. He worked with different processes, including Cinerama and VistaVision, on richly-textured and sweeping outdoor westerns such as John Sturges’s 1960 “The Magnificent Seven” and John Ford and Henry Hathaway’s 1962 “How the West Was Won’. Lang also did the cinematography for romantic thrillers such as Stanley Donen’s 1963 romantic mystery “Charade” with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, and William Wyler’s art theft film “How to Steal a Million” with Audrey Hepburn, Peter O’Toole and Charles Boyer.
Charles Lang won an Academy Award Oscar, the second time he received a nomination, for his work on “Farewell to Arms”. He was nominated eighteen times which tied him with cinematographer Leon Shamroy who did most of his work for 20th Century Fox. In 1991, Lang received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Cinematographer for a career that included one hundred and fourteen feature films. Charles Lang died in Santa Monica, California in April of 1998 at the age of ninety-six.