Customer Reviews

Destiny [VHS]

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Destiny is not a particularly good title for Fritz Lang's Der Müde Tod. Translated literally the title means `The Tired Death' and this is much better, for the film is about Death being tired of the work he has to perform. The figure of Death thus becomes a fairly sympathetic character trying desperately to help. When he is appealed to by a young woman who has just lost her fiancé, he gives her three chances to bring her beloved back from the dead. Lang shows a room full of candles each representing a human life and then shows three of these candles flickering and about to go out. The task that Death sets the young woman is to save any one of the three lives represented by the candles. Lang then shows the woman and her fiancé in three stories representing each of the candles. These stories are wonderfully imaginative and present vivid images of Persia, Renaissance Venice and China.

Lang's film is full of amazing special effects including a flying horse and flying carpet sequence which influenced Douglas Fairbanks when he made The Thief of Bagdad. However, it is the emotional atmosphere of the film which makes it truly memorable. Lang shows the desperation of the young woman and makes us care about her plight. But it is with his image of the compassionate Death that Lang really shows his originality. This is a Death wishing and willing to resurrect the dead and going as far as he can, because he cares about the woman and her fiancé also. Finally Death becomes a caring friend wrapping his arms around the couple. It is an ambiguous image, but one of great power.

The quality of the print used for this Image DVD is superb. It is colour tinted in a variety of shades and shows very little damage. This is a beautiful film and all the details of the amazing production-design can be seen and appreciated. There is some slight cropping of the film on the left hand side, but this is hardly noticeable. The credits and the title cards have been reconstructed and newly translated. The original fonts have been reproduced, which is fine, but it must be said that the Gothic typeface can be a little hard to read. Finally the film is accompanied by a fine score which fits in very well with the eerie mood of the film.

Image has earned itself a reputation for high quality, digitally remastered DVD editions of films from the silent era (though, admittedly, they do have a few dismal releases to their name), and their growing catalogue of early Expressionist cinema is particularly exciting. The present DVD edition of this early Fritz Lang film features yet another outstanding transfer, digitally remastered from a 35mm fine grain master print of the French reissue version. Moreover the transfer preserves the film's original "square" aspect ratio with vertical black bars and a horizontal bar at the bottom of the frame (in other words, there is either NO or very minimal cropping). In addition, as already highlighted in other reviews, this Image release provides newly translated English intertitles, some of which were missing in previous versions, and which reproduce the font of the original titles. My only complaint with this Image release is that it is a barebones edition, which shows not just in the absence of audio commentary (which I can live without, as long as the transfer is good), but in the clumsy menu options and scene access, as well as in the austere packaging. These concerns, however, are quite peripheral.

With respect to the film itself, a previous reviewer has provided a marvelous narrative and thematic exposition of the film which I will not bother to repeat. Though one of Lang's lesser known works, Destiny is a truly groundbreaking and highly poetic piece of cinema. As with Ingmar Bergman's THE SEVENTH SEAL, Fritz Lang's DESTINY (Der Mude Tod) succeeds in remythologizing familiar allegories and symbols of death and infusing them anew with eloquence and expressive force. Bunuel's confession that this film opened his eyes to "the poetic expressiveness of cinema" is not in the least bit hyperbolic

In sum, I highly recommend this DVD edition.

A young couple, very much in love, stop off at a tavern in a small 19th century German village. A gaunt, grim faced stranger joins them. Just recently the stranger had purchased a 99-year lease on a tract of land adjoining the village's cemetery. The stranger had built an impregnable, `without door or gate', wall about the estate.
The stranger, of course, is Death, and within the walls of his `garden' reside the souls of the newly dead and the innumerable candles whose flames melt the tallow of all human life. Death attends the young man he is about to claim. The woman leaves the room for a moment, and when she returns the stranger and her beloved are gone. The woman gives chases, sees the shade of her beloved pass through the impassable wall to Death's garden. An old apothecary finds the distraught woman and shelters her in his pharmacy. The woman drinks a potion from an ancient bottle and is again in front of the walled garden - although now there is a door opening to a steep staircase. The woman enters and meets Death of the staircases. I want to go where my beloved is, the woman tells him.
Death strikes a bargain - if the woman can save the life of just one of three whose candle has grown short, he will return her fiancé to her.
I liked Fritz Lang's DESTINY (Der Müde Tod) a lot. Death's bargain plunges the movie into three episodes, as the actors playing the loving couple and Death reenact endangered love stories in Arab, Italian and Chinese settings. Lang employs primitive, and effective, tricks - camera angles, double exposures, etc. - to show the dead filing past the living, to make carpets fly and to transform pagoda into elephants. Underpinning it all is the fascinating struggle between Death and Love. It's Lang's meditation on this struggle that I enjoyed the most. After that poignant scene on the staircase I was hooked on the woman's quest for reunion.
The musical underscore is appropriate, tasteful and unobtrusive. The print is in good condition, watchable with flares and scratches. Although this disk is a little pricey, it contains no extras of any kind.

When I first began to study film history, Fritz Lang's "Destiny" was a film I never expected to see. It was widely considered a "lost" film. When prints surfaced in the '60's, I anticipated seeing it very eagerly. I saw it as part of a course in the aesthetics of German expressionism/surrealiism while in graduate school, with a synchronized taped music track especially created by one of my fellow students. I was enthralled. Since films were available "as film" in those days, I knew that, sadly, my budget precluded my ever hoping to own a print. Thank the gods for DVD!

"Destiny" is surely one of the finest films of its time and place -- a pinnacle of German filmmaking. It contains humor, adventure, pathos and visual poetry. the acting, executed by a top-rank German cast, is stylized, but in ways very suited to the distinct art of the silent film. The special effects, done by means as old as film itself, and far cruder than today's computerized examples, still surprise and delight. "Destiny",
as a whole, tells several stories within an elegiac framing, but is still tightly organized and coheres to reveal itself as a visual/dramatic poem
a ballade. It is one of the most beautiful silent films I have ever seen.

Destiny is one of Fritz Lang's lesser known films, but it is one of his best. The story begins with two lovers who find themselves separated from each other when Death moves into the neighborhood. Death has created a huge burial ground surrounded by walls almost up to the sky and no door to enter. He takes the man away from the woman who desperately tries to get him back. She follows Death and finds him beckoning spirits through the tall walls, her lover in the crowd. She begs Death to return her love to her, and he shows her three candles that are getting shorter as they speak. He tells her that if she can save one of the three people whose life's flame is growing dim, he will return her lover to her. She then enters three different historical settings to try to win her lover's life.

The film is somewhat similar to DW Griffith's masterpiece Intolerance in that it switches between four stories, each similar to each other but in different time periods, to establish one overall story. However, Destiny achieves it better by a mile, effectively switching between them so the audience understands and by not letting any of them run on for too long.

Destiny is an eerie, supernatural type of a film but it is also quite relatable and interesting to watch.

DESTINY or to be more precise TIRED DEATH (as the film was originally known in Germany) was the first big international success for Fritz Lang and his collaborator Thea von Harbou. She would marry him after this film and be responsible for his scenarios until Lang left her and Germany in 1933. They made quite a team with von Harbou's romantic quasi-mystical stories softening the hard edge of Lang's no-nonsense direction. He gave her stories depth while she gave his films compassion. I digress about Lang and von Harbou because DESTINY reveals the various aspects of their developing relationship while engaging us with its allegorical story of Death and Love triumphant.

The plot is relatively simple. In an old German village Death takes a young maiden's fiance' and she tries to get him back. If she can prevent any one of three characters from suffering a preordained fate (hence the English title DESTINY) Death will restore her loved one. This allows Lang and von Harbou the opportunity to use exotic locales for the three seperate stories making this one of the first anthology films. After she fails to alter their fates Death gives her one last chance. She has one hour to bring him a life in exchange for that of her betrothed. The sets, the lighting, the camerawork are all exemplary. German expressionism meets Scandinavian pastoral meets film noir. The performances may seem exaggerated in places but remember this was not meant to be realistic. Bernhard Goetzke however is outstanding as the weary but compassionate Death.

This video version is taken from a French re-issue print that has some issues of its own. While the overall image quality is not bad, the color tints are overdone in some scenes and underdone in others. The editing in the climactic fire sequence seems repetitive and disjointed which leads me to believe that Lang's original version has been tampered with. This edition, produced by David Shepard, restores the original text to the title cards as well as the the different styles of print used for each story which is a nice touch. The musical score by Rodney Sauer is low-key and melancholy which suits the material perfectly. He also makes good use of the Romance movement from Eduoard Lalo's Piano Trio Op.7 as the theme of the young lovers.

I hadn't intended on writing a review of this film as there are several other fine ones but as DESTINY remains my personal favorite among Fritz Lang's films for its allegorical nature and striking fairy tale imagery AND having watched it several times recently I couldn't resist. Perhaps someday a full restoration will be done on the film and then made available on home video. That would certainly be a 5 star affair. In closing (considering the nature of the film) I should report that Thea von Harbou died in Germany in 1954 while Fritz Lang died in Hollywood in 1976.

I've only ever found really poor quality, often chopped up versions of this early Lang film (Der Mude Tod is original title), but this DVD looks fantastic. The film itself is pretty unique, worth watching, but not a masterpiece, especially in light of Lang's other achievements. The music by the Mont Alto Orchestra is well done - I saw these guys perform live to Harold Lloyd's "Kid Brother" and they did a great job. Check 'em out live if you can!

I am very cautious about recommending silent films but some transcend genres. This is such a film. Basically, Death takes
a woman's lover, and she embarks on a quest to save him. The theme of the movie is the Song of Songs..."love is as strong as death." Here the Death figure takes pity on the lover as
the Queen of Hades took pity on Orpheus in the Underworld. The photography is dreamlike, transporting the viewer to distant, exotic lands. This is not one of Fritz Lang's best known works but I believe it approaches the genius of his other film oevre. I am privileged to own this DVD and I see it once a year.

A young betrothed couple is traveling and stops at an unnamed town on their travels. Here the young man's (Walter Janssen) time on this world has expired and the Grim Reaper (Bernhard Goetzke) has taken him away. Distort and refusing to believe the situation is hapless his fiancé (Lil Dagover) reads that love is stronger than death. So death strikes a bargain with her. If she can save one of three men that are also about to expire she can save her betrothed.

The three people are from different lands and times. As each story unfolds we see that the same actors that played the original people also play the main characters in each scenario.

Will she succeed in the task by saving one or more of the soon to expire men?
If she does not succeed, is there any hope?
What would you do given the choices?

Who is to say what love really is?

This is based upon a dream that Frits Lang had as a child.

The only drawback on this version of the movie is that they use different fonts on the verbal displays in this silent film to depict the different eras and scenarios. It takes time to get use to the different fonts.

Die Nibelungen

I bought this movie on a whim.
I knew of Fritz Lang and I am a fan of silent films so I thought I'd take a chance on this.
I'm glad I did,
This is a wonderful movie, and the visual effects for a film that is over 80 years old are impressive.

The three sub-stories, where the heroine tried to win back the life of her fiance, are sad and unique from each other.

I'm giving this film 4-stars.
I was disappointed that there was no film history information or discussion on this DVD. I thought that the Image Entertainment release would include this, but I guess they didn't think it was necessary. Oh well.
Otherwise an outstanding film and in great condition, considering it's age.