As a young couple stops and rests in a small village inn, the man is abducted by Death and is sequestered behind a huge doorless, windowless wall. The woman finds a mystic entrance and is met by Death, who tells her three separate stories set in exotic locales, all involving circumstances similar to hers.
Lil Dagover Walter Janssen Bernhard Goetzke Hans Sternberg Karl Rückert Max Adalbert Wilhelm Diegelmann Erich Pabst Karl Platen Hermann Picha Paul Rehkopf Max Pfeiffer Georg John Lydia Potechina Grete Berger Rudolf Klein-Rogge Eduard von Winterstein Lothar Müthel Edgar Pauly Louis Brody Károly Huszár Paul Biensfeldt Neumann-Schüler Ernst Rückert Hermann Vallentin Erika Unruh
Уморената смърт, Las tres luces, Väsynyt kuolema, Les trois lumières, Az éjféli vándor, Zmeczona smierc, Sudbina, Between Two Worlds, 지친 죽음, 데스티니, Destino, Les Trois Lumières, La muerte cansada, Усталая смерть, 三生计, Den obesegrade döden, Unavená smrt, A Morte Cansada, 운명, Zmęczona śmierć, Стомлена Смерть
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France
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USA
From a visual perspective, it’s stunning, impactful, and striking. Fritz Lang is certainly a force to be reckoned with, and this film alone can easily defend that claim. It’s without a doubt ambitious and innovative, but when it comes to the plot there are disconcerting efforts. In particular, it’s the anthology of the three romantic tragedies that drag the film from a stable level of coherence. They are exotic and bizarre, and while this level of fantasy can further show the strong direction from Lang, it unfortunately results in a lot of unnecessary scenes that tear the film’s identity. That’s not to say those scenes were unenjoyable, but it definitely made me struggle to connect with the story as I fumbled to justify their purpose.
Fritz Lang’s silent picture, Der müde Tod or Destiny (1921) which is his most iconic work before Metropolis (1927) and M (1931), depicts a grieving young woman, her recently deceased fiancé, and an unusual sympathetic Grim Reaper! Sympathetic, for I believe that this angel questions the subject of life by acknowledging its worthiness in a moral way.
Lil Dagover as the young woman after finding Walter Janssen as her beloved man dead, meets the understanding figure of Death, portrayed by Bernhard Goetzke. Their pure devotion to one another is so deep that the Death surprisingly offers her a deal to save her fiancé’s life in one of three alternative realities: China, Persia, and 15th-century Venice, so that he can spare…
Fritz Lang’s Destiny is an expressionistic romantic-fantasy that centers on a young 19th-century woman as she challenges “Death” in the hope of bringing back her prematurely taken love. What follows are three moral parables - set in Persia, exotic Venice and imperial China - each dealing with ill-fated love.
The multi-story format affords Lang limitless opportunities to exercise his cinematic chops. The sets are as usual breathtaking from gothic cathedrals to eerie sky-scraping walls to oriental castles to never-ending staircases. There’s some stunning imagery on view like the disappearance of a spectral horde into a wall at midnight or of a terrifying hour-glass vision - forecasting impending doom. Candles are used to great effect both aesthetically (to complement the surreal setting) and thematically (as…
Death abducts a young man who travels with his fiancee, because his time has come. The desperate woman pleads with him and a weary Grim Reaper gives her three chances to change destiny. If she is successful even in one, then he will spare her lover's life.
Fritz Lang's first significant movie remains a century later an amazing and powerful meditation on love, death, and the inevitability of fate, more fresh and engrossing than 90% of what modern cinema has to offer. And it's not that it leaves anything to be desired technically. The special effects are fantastic considering the meager resources that were at the director's disposal. The trademark expressionist cinematography and nimble editing give the film a distinct…
The most memorable elements of Fritz Lang's Destiny are all found in the way the movie looks: the massive wall surrounding Death's domain; the narrow, endless staircase inside its hidden door; the featureless shadows against towering, bright backdrops; the gleefully sophisticated visual tricks the director employs with ever-greater confident. Already, Lang the craftsman proves himself to be miles beyond the visual simplicity and efficiency of the Spiders films.
It's in these newly sophisticated visual elements that we see a master being wrought: see his growing understanding of the use and impact of scale; the power of repeated patterns in space; the use of unnamed, unidentified bodies to create shapes and patterns. It is here that the birth of breathtaking works such as Die Nibelungen and Metropolis truly begins.
"Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm. For love is strong as death, passion is cruel as the grave. It blazes up like blazing fire, fiercer than any flame."
A young couple in love. They sit down together at a bar with a stranger. Suddenly, the tall glass of beer on the table turns into an hourglass. The stranger is Death, and in time he comes for us all. Fritz Lang conceptualized Destiny after the traumatic loss of his mother, and through it we can see him struggle to come to terms with the inevitable finitude of mortality. Here, Death has come for this woman's lover, but they are both still young, and…
Fritz Lang's ambitious tale of love vs death, his first major picture, showcases the director's talents. The plot concerns the female half of a pair of sweethearts, who bargains with death to save her beloved. She is put into three stories, with the task of changing fate. The film is very literal - the black clad stranger representing Death; his walled domain sealing off a separate dimension and the candles that represent the living and the time they have left, to name but a few. Destiny is told over six chapters, three of which take place in different and distinct time periods. This allows for some amazing fantastical visuals and special effects, particularly in the third one which takes place…
Great prequel to the Final Destination series.
Inspired by the recent articles by Samm Deighan's at Diabolique on the silent film period of director Fritz Lang, I decided to fill in this gap. Incredibly, the recent restoration is available now (1/2018) on Netflix and it looks beautiful. It's got all the things I like in silents- unforgettable images, haunting sets, bizarre cinematography, fairy tale overtones, life-threatening melodrama, surreal humor, and every single actor on the screen, from leads to extras, is overacting and dressed like Halloween.
Watched for week 2 of the 2018 Cult Movie Challenge.
If only this film would have been the beginning and the ending, I would have absolutely adored it. It stars quietly but suddenly takes a form of an adventure film. Very proficiently made with glimpses of poetry every now and then. Perhaps a bit too lively to my tastes (the last of the three stories was beyond ridiculous, I couldn't relate to it at all) but I think one can still learn a lot. The best moment of the film definitely happens at the beginning where an intertitle reads something in the lines of "grave-digger sees strangely familiar character" and this gravedigger character meets the Death himself but so far what we know about this gloomy character is that he is "stranger". It's of course very obvious from the very first moments of the film who this character is but this moment is pure poetry. Only if the film could have followed in its lines.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Macbeth 5:5
Silent era Fritz Lang never fails to “dispel my imperial boredom with never-before-seen magic tricks” (to crib from my favorite inter-title.) Lang is one of the great cinema innovators, and here he shows us in the medium’s early days the both challenges of creating a successful anthology film and strategies for overcoming them. Stealing one of Cervantes’ structural tricks, Lang and Thea von Harbou create a compelling frame story that surrounds three intercalated tales on a similar theme in three different historical eras. This gives Lang a chance to show off his architectural background and imagineering future.
In the frame story, a…
The anthology-esque narrative is so loose even by silent era standards that the film doesn't really hang together, but Lang is still the king. The technical innovations and superimposition work is sublime, and the production design of each segment is opulent. But honestly his direction is never better than in the framing device where he frames Death as a shadowed automaton, all the more terrifying for dispassionately just doing his job.
