---
name: "Walter Lang"
canonical: "https://film.one/person/walter-lang"
roles: ["Director"]
born: "10 August 1896"
died: "7 February 1972"
reviewed_on_fi1m: 1
average_as: "director"
average_over: 1
updated: "2026-09-19T22:28:48.682860+00:00"
licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL."
---

# Walter Lang

Director. Born 10 August 1896 in Memphis, Tennessee, USA. Died 7 February 1972.

## Details

- **Work:** Director
- **Born:** 10 August 1896, Memphis, Tennessee, USA
- **Died:** 7 February 1972
- **Also known as:** Вальтер Ланг
- **Academy Awards:** 1 Oscar nomination
- **Elsewhere:** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Lang, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q269796, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0485943/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/80570

## Fi1m on Walter Lang

> Walter Lang made Technicolor musicals for Fox for a quarter of a century and made them well without ever making them his own. The songs are staged cleanly, the stars are looked after, and the camera rarely has an opinion of its own.

In *State Fair* (1945) the biggest thing at stake is whether a hog wins a ribbon, and Walter Lang films it as if that were exactly the right size of problem. He does not hurry. He puts the camera in front of the song, leaves it there while Rodgers and Hammerstein do the work, and moves on to the next one. It is the habit of a man who had been at Fox for a decade by then and knew what the studio wanted: the picture delivered on time, the stars in good light, nobody startled.

He had started directing silents in 1925, after clerical work at a production company led to assistant directing, and after a short attempt at painting in Paris that he does not seem to have carried into the films. He joined 20th Century Fox in the mid-1930s and stayed for 34 pictures. *The Little Princess* (1939), a colour vehicle for Shirley Temple, marked his arrival as a director of the studio's prestige product, and after that the shape rarely changed: songs, stars, a story that ends as it should. Betty Grable made five films with him and Clifton Webb three. *Cheaper by the Dozen* (1950) was a family comedy without the songs, *There's No Business Like Show Business* (1954) was Irving Berlin with them, and *The King and I* (1956) was the large Broadway adaptation his name is most often attached to. He retired after *Snow White and the Three Stooges* (1961), a title that says most of what needs saying about where the studio musical had got to by then. He died in 1972.

What he could do was fit a number into a story so that the join did not show. What he did not do, on any evidence we have seen, was bring anything of his own to the space between the numbers. In *State Fair* the romances are thin and Lang shows no curiosity about them; the film only sharpens when the parents are on screen, and they take it away from the young leads without appearing to try. We came out humming two of the songs and unable to remember a single shot, which is about as exact a description of his career as we can offer.

Most of what has been written about him says the same thing: a dependable craftsman inside the system, not an artist with a signature. On the evidence we have, we have no quarrel with that, and we would add that dependable is not nothing. Films that run to time, sound good and let the stars be stars were what the studio paid for, and he supplied them for thirty years.

Start with *State Fair*. It is short, it is sunny, and in 100 minutes it will tell you whether Lang's way of doing things is one you want to spend more evenings with.

## Biography

Walter Lang was an American film director. Born in Memphis, Tennessee, he began working in the film industry in New York as a clerk before becoming an assistant director. He directed his first feature, the silent film *The Red Kimono*, in 1925.

Lang had a long association with Twentieth Century-Fox, where he directed numerous Technicolor musicals in the 1940s and 1950s. His credits include *State Fair* (1945), *The King and I* (1956), for which he received an Academy Award nomination for directing, *Desk Set* (1957), *There's No Business Like Show Business* (1954) and *Cheaper by the Dozen* (1950). He retired from directing after *Snow White and the Three Stooges* (1961).

*Sources: en.wikipedia.org, britannica.com, catalog.afi.com.*

## On Fi1m (1)

- *State Fair* (1945), Fi1m 70, Director — [page](https://film.one/film/state-fair.md)

## Complete filmography (66)

Every credit, newest first. Titles without a page can be requested for review on the HTML page.

- *The Searching Eye* (1964), as The boy
- *Snow White and the Three Stooges* (1961), Director
- *The Marriage-Go-Round* (1961), Director
- *Can-Can* (1960), Director
- *But Not for Me* (1959), Director
- *Desk Set* (1957), Director
- *The King and I* (1956), Director
- *There's No Business Like Show Business* (1954), Director
- *Call Me Madam* (1953), Director
- *With a Song in My Heart* (1952), Director
- *On the Riviera* (1951), Director
- *The Jackpot* (1950), Director
- *Cheaper by the Dozen* (1950), Director
- *You're My Everything* (1949), Director
- *When My Baby Smiles at Me* (1948), Director
- *Sitting Pretty* (1948), Director
- *Mother Wore Tights* (1947), Director
- *Sentimental Journey* (1946), Director
- *Claudia and David* (1946), Director
- *State Fair* (1945), Director — Fi1m 70, [page](https://film.one/film/state-fair.md)
- *Greenwich Village* (1944), Director
- *Coney Island* (1943), Director
- *The Magnificent Dope* (1942), Director
- *Song of the Islands* (1942), Director
- *Week-End in Havana* (1941), Director
- *Moon Over Miami* (1941), Director
- *Tin Pan Alley* (1940), Director
- *The Great Profile* (1940), Director
- *Star Dust* (1940), Director
- *The Blue Bird* (1940), Director
- *The Little Princess* (1939), Director
- *I'll Give a Million* (1938), Director
- *The Baroness and the Butler* (1938), Director
- *Second Honeymoon* (1937), Director
- *Wife, Doctor and Nurse* (1937), Director
- *Top of the Town* (1937), Director
- *Love Before Breakfast* (1936), Director
- *Hooray for Love* (1935), Director
- *Carnival* (1935), Director
- *The Mighty Barnum* (1934), Director
- *The Party's Over* (1934), Director
- *Whom the Gods Destroy* (1934), Director
- *Meet the Baron* (1933), Director
- *The Warrior's Husband* (1933), Director, Writer
- *No More Orchids* (1932), Director
- *Women Go on Forever* (1931), Director
- *Hell Bound* (1931), Director
- *Command Performance* (1931), Director
- *Brothers* (1930), Director
- *The Costello Case* (1930), Director
- *The Big Fight* (1930), Director
- *Cock o' the Walk* (1930), Director
- *Hello Sister* (1930), Director
- *The Spirit of Youth* (1929), Director
- *The Desert Bride* (1928), Director
- *Alice Through a Looking Glass* (1928), Director
- *The Night Flyer* (1928), Director
- *The College Hero* (1927), Director
- *By Whose Hand?* (1927), Director
- *Sally in Our Alley* (1927), Director
- *The Satin Woman* (1927), Director, Story, Screenplay
- *Money to Burn* (1926), Director
- *The Golden Web* (1926), Director
- *The Earth Woman* (1926), Director
- *The Red Kimona* (1925), Director
- *As a Man Lives* (1923), Assistant Director

## Gallery

- ![Walter Lang](https://film.one/media/person/1226801/gallery-2853ecc5e93a.png) Walter Lang — Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Walter_Lang_%281896%E2%80%931972%29.png?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled)
- ![Walter Lang](https://film.one/media/person/1226801/gallery-9717f7a62b2d.jpg) Walter Lang — Image via TMDB

## Awards

### Academy Awards — 0 won, 1 nominated

- 1957: Best Director (nominated), for *The King and I*

*From Wikidata, which records wins more completely than nominations.*

---
© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/walter-lang