Der Müde Tod (1921)
Directed by Fritz Lang

Film Review

Der Müde Tod (a.k.a. Destiny) may have received a lukewarm reception fom critics and audiences when it was first seen in Germany but today there is little doubt that it is the first work in which Fritz Lang demonstrated his genius for creative filmmaking.  A hauntingly poetic fantasy which could not be further removed from the realist dramas of Lang's American period, Der Müde Tod is the first and most visually daring of the director's expressionistic masterpieces, a film that not only influenced his contemporaries (most notably F.W. Murnau) but also inspired many other great cineastes, including Alfred Hitchcock and Luis Buñuel.  In making the film, Lang and his designers appear to have taken their inspiration from both contemporary and classical German art, combining modern expressionistic motifs with the distinctive stylisation of such artists as Albrecht Dürer. The result is one of the most fascinating examples of early German cinema.

The film is atypical for Lang both in its fantastic subject matter (pure fantasy is a genre that Lang tended to avoid, unlike many of his contemporaries) and its complex narrative structure, which comprises three self-contained stories within a framing story.  Each part of the film was assigned a different creative team, something that gives it a striking diversity in appearance, tone and impact.  The sequences that make up the framing story are the most chilling and are visibly influenced by an earlier expressionistic fantasy piece, Robert Wiene's Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (1920).  The representation of Death as a mysterious, seemingly benign old man dressed in black is a concept that Ingmar Bergman would subsequently employ for his 1957 film, The Seventh Seal, and it seemly likely he borrowed the idea from Lang.

Given how short the three contained stories are (the first is set 9th century Persia, the second in 17th century Venice and the third in feudal China), it is astonishing how ornate and grand the sets are, typical of the extraordinarily high standard achieved at the Decla-Bioscop studios (later to become Ufa) in the 1920s.  The special effects are just as impressive, particularly in the Chinese sequence, where Lang and his technical team use travelling mattes and superposition to great effect to conjure up such astonishing spectacles as a huge miniature army and a flying horse.  The actor Douglas Fairbanks was so impressed by the film's special effects (especially the flying carpet sequence) that he bought the rights to the film to prevent it from being released in America, enabling him to copy the effects and pass them off as his own.  Lang's impact on Hollywood began long before his arrival in Tinseltown in the mid-1930s.

The sheer thematic variety offered by Der Müde Tod gave Lang immense scope for experimenting with filmmaking technique and visual storytelling which he seized with both hands, and whilst the film does not quite have the coherence and impact of his subsequent work it was clearly an important milestone in his career.  What came immediately after this astonishing work was a string of a hugely ambitious masterpieces - Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922), Die Nibelungen (1924), Metropolis (1927), Spione (1928) - which rapidly established Lang as Germany's most important film director and one of the most creative talents of his generation.

Film Synopsis

Shortly after their arrival in a provincial German town a young woman learns that her fiancé has been taken from her by a mysterious stranger dressed in back. The woman manages to pass through a huge wall that is impenetrable to mortals and finds the stranger in the dark world beyond.  Identifying himself as Death, the stranger tells the woman that her fiancé now belongs to him but he promises to restore him to her if she can prove her belief that love is more powerful than death.  The woman is transported to three different periods in history, but despite her best efforts she fails to prevent her beloved from being claimed by Death.  The stranger offers her one last chance: her fiancé will be brought back to life if she can find someone to take his place in the afterlife...