FritzLang was one of pre-Nazi Germany’s great directors. M and Metropolis are thefilms for which he is best known, and deservedly so, but all his movies are ofinterest. Recent years have seen a spate of carefully restored prints, in somecases enabling us to make sense of films that had long seemed fragmentary. Twoof the latest restorations, The Spiders and Destiny, have been issued onBlu-ray.
TheSpiders, his third project as writer-director, was released in two parts in1919 and 1920. Apparently influenced by such French serials as Fantomas andL’Vampires, as well as the era’s Edgar Rice Burroughs pulp fiction, The Spiderscontains many elements that would remain prevalent in adventure flicks fordecades, if not a century, to come. It includes a lost civilization, an Incaremnant somewhere in Latin America; elaborate technology including push-buttondoors and closed circuit television; globe-hopping chases; clock-ticking actionsequences; and a sinister international criminal organization with vagueanti-Western aspirations.
Curiouslyfor a German film in the immediate aftermath of World War I, the hero of TheSpiders is American (or at least a legal resident), theadventurer-yachtsman-millionaire with the curious name of Kay Hoog. His nemesisis a woman, Lio Sha, introduced as an exotic femme fatale but soon enoughwearing the pants, literally and figuratively, as a criminal mastermind. Likemany movies of its kind, the first installment is better than the sequel. Bothare packed into a single Blu-ray disc.
WithDestiny (1921), Lang directed a film that would nowadays be classed as arthouse—and as a likely influence on Ingmar Bergman. The star is a grimlypurposeful but not evil figure in black, Death, who visits a 19thcentury German town and leases land around which he builds a wall with nogates. Only the souls he claims can pass through the barrier. Lang’s irresistibleurge toward action in exotic places leads to digressions set in late medieval Bagdad,Renaissance Italy and Imperial China, with Death as the character linking eachof the stories and their characters.
