Two of Fritz Lang’s final films have been reissued on a Blu-ray called “Fritz Lang’s Indian Epic.” There are two ways to appreciate the pair of 1959 pictures, The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb. They can be enjoyed as delirious camp or as an interesting footnote to the director’s oeuvre, a body of work that was outstanding from the 1920s through the mid-‘50s.
The auteur behind such important and still engaging films as Metropolis (1927), M (1931) and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1932) cowrote the screenplay for the Indian movies in the 1920s with his wife Thea von Harbou. Lang claims he was slated at the time to direct the Indian project but the original renditions were helmed instead by Joe May.
As mentioned in Tom Gunning’s booklet essay for the Blu-ray, “Lang’s return [from Hollywood] to Germany in the late 1950s brought an elegant circularity to his career.” He was given the unusual opportunity to pick up and work with a loose thread from his peak period. The pair of films that resulted represent a posthumous collaboration with his estranged ex-wife (Harbou was already dead when Lang returned).
As for camp, the discontinuities between location footage and studio sets are as apparent as an open seam on the arm of a suit jacket. The dialogue—“May the gods give you a bowl of water in the heat of your thirst”—sounds silly coming from one-dimensional actors. The cartoony story concerns a gallant European man, fearless in the face of insolent sepoys and ravenous tigers, rescuing a temple dancer promised to the maharajah. In sets drenched in bright color, muscled men pound gongs with giant drumsticks, gorgeous women dance in serpentine motion to the rhythm of the tabla and processions of elephants wind through the streets. For American audiences, hearing turbaned men and sari-clad women speaking their lines auf deutsch only heightens the camp.
The “Indian Epic” was already anachronistic at the time of its release but was a box-office hit in Germany and can be enjoyed in the same spirit as an early ‘30s Hollywood exotic adventure—just the kind of movies that inspired Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.
